Running on "E"

I drove Tori to school when she was in 7th and 8th grade. It was good to hang out with my daughter and have random conversations. We fought over what we should listen to on the radio. I wanted to listen to NPR in the morning and I love The Engines of Our Ingenuity. She hated it and wanted to listen to the corny DJ’s on KSBJ – the local Christian Radio Station.

I think the thing that probably drove Tori crazy more than anything else is that I would let the fuel in my Explorer go all the way down to empty on the gas gauge before I put more gas in it.

I would say, “Tori I hope we make it to school today. If the truck dies be ready to get out and push it to the side of the road and then we can walk the rest of the way.”

“Dad!” she would scream, “Get some gas before you have to drive me to school. Why do you always let your truck get so close to empty?”

I think her fear had more to do with being seen by her friends on the side of the road with her dad who was not smart enough to add more gas when the gauge read “E”.

I don’t know why I let my truck get to the point of running on fumes before I would go to the gas pump. It was completely unnecessary. I had money to put more gas in. I guess it was inconvenient, but how much more inconvenient would it have been to be sitting on the side of the road with a truck that would not run due to a lack of fuel.

The gas gauge on my truck is not the only place I run on empty. Some mornings I wake up feeling drained, just because I wanted to stay up and watch one more play of Monday Night Football when it was obvious the Patriots were going to beat the Vikings – and who cares which of those teams win anyway.

I push myself and fill my day up with the unnecessary causing myself to have no room for error and being empty on extra time.

I let the spiritual slide, when I know it is the most important thing I can do and my soul is empty of what it needs to be filled with the most.

How long can I run on that red line close to “E”?

Me or the thought of me

I am almost embarrassed to say that I have seen the movie Failure to Launch - twice. Once on a plane to Nepal and once, at my suggestion, Andrea and I rented it and watched it at home. It wasn't a horrible movie but it was not great either; just a diversion.

There is a part of the movie where the main character, Tripp who is a boat salesman, is talking to his "nephew" as they sit next to a boat. The kid says something to the effect of "I love this boat." To which Tripp replies "You don't love this boat. You are just in love with the idea of a boat."

Profound dialog I think. I go through life loving the idea of many things but never really in love with the things themselves. Just like people love the idea of a boat but would never spend the time, work or money required to actually enjoy the thing, I love the idea of stuff but I am never going to spend the time, money or effort to actually experience those same things at the highest levels.

I would love to lift weights and have big muscles and be stronger. But truthfully I don't love to lift weights because it is not convenient.

I would love to save money. But I am only in love with the idea of making good investments for my future because really I love to spend money NOW.

I would love to practice the faith I say I believe. But when it comes down to it I love laziness rather than discipline and actually acting on the things I say I believe doesn't fit my self-centeredness. My faith is sometimes only a good idea rather than a reality.

I was running last week and listening to John Mayer. On his new CD Continuum he has this song called "I Don't Trust Myself" where he asks this girl "Who do you love - me or the thought of me?"

I am in love with the thought of being in love, but sometimes love takes a lot of work. To lay down my life for another person and to look after her interests rather than my own is beyond what I am sometimes willing to do. Will I go beyond the mere idea of being in love and do the hard work love requires?

I hope so. She is worth it.

Too personal to post ...

I have a blog post in my head (actually I have typed it out a couple of times) but it is way too personal to actually publish. I can’t get past it to write anything else so I have posted nothing. I’ll try later.

Love is a disease ...

Love is a disease no one wants to get rid of. Those who catch it never try to get better, and those who suffer do not wish to be cured.

- Anonymous Persian Sage

There is much that could be said about that statement but anything I would try to add would seem shallow and I think it is best to let it sit there and do its work.

In Between

I do not like being between places but that is where I find myself, in the "in between".

Who will listen to me here when next week I will be somewhere else? While I am in the "in between" no one there will listen to me either even though they say they are glad I am coming.

Why do I even feel like I need to be heard? Because there are things that are happening in both places I care about. Since I am "in between" I should just be quiet. I’m sure if I made noise no one would listen.

Even though I like change (to the point where I have been called schizo) it is strange to be in between.

Belief

There are things that I believe that fuel much of what I do. There are things I say I believe that I must not believe so much or I would live a life where my actions showed those beliefs to be true.

The things I believe most deeply come out in the way I live. I can talk all I want but belief is seen in action.

I’ve heard well meaning people say “You’ve got to stand up for what you believe in” - which on the surface sounds like great advice. But what if your beliefs are really wack? Say you believe that if you fly an airplane into a tall building full of thousands of people in the name of your religion that you will be reward by god in eternity. Is that the kind of belief it is okay to stand up for?

I have no answers, only questions brought on by John Mayer’s new CD Continuum.

Everyone believes
In how they think it ought to be
Everyone believes
And they’re not going easily

Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
Like punching in the water
You can never hit what you’re trying for

Belief - John Mayer

Change is good

My life is changing a bit. Here is what I wrote to Brazos Pointe Fellowship:

I love Brazos Pointe Fellowship. I remember the first Sunday the Stunz family attended. It was the second Sunday of Brazos Pointe Fellowship's official existence and everyone in our family loved it. We had just moved back to Brazosport from Spring, Texas and Andrea and I felt like we should visit other churches to make sure we knew where God wanted us. The kids wouldn't hear of it. They felt like they had already heard from God and he was saying we needed to be at Brazos Pointe Fellowship.

I never dreamed that God would take us from the point of being members and volunteers at Brazos Pointe Fellowship to being on staff and working here. But that is exactly what God chose to do.

I used to think that God was logical and rational but through the path of my life I've found that sometimes God can't completely be explained. God is at times mysterious and cannot be figured out. Just like God made a major turn in my life in the summer of 2003, Andrea and I feel he is making a change of direction in our life yet again.

The change I am talking about is not going to lead us away from Brazos Pointe Fellowship. This is our church and this is where we desire to be. At the beginning of October though, I am going back to work in a secular job similar to many of you. As I just said, God is mysterious and I do not completely understand why He is leading me in this direction but I am convinced that it is definitely His direction.

I will continue to share preaching responsibilities with Greg. I will teach Discovering Your Design with Mary Margaret. I will continue to lead a small group and I will still run sound (because I dig music). The only difference is that I will not be on Brazos Pointe Fellowship's Leadership Team and will no longer be paid by the church. I will be a passionate volunteer. I believe in what goes on here. I believe in the vision of Brazos Pointe Fellowship and will remain a part of it. For many of you things won't look that different.

Come this weekend and hear the rest of the story as Greg and I preach together “Under the Influence – Part 2”

- Tommy

In my blog resurrection post I said that I would not write as "Tommy, the guy who gets paid to work at church." Now that will be true because at the end of the month I will no longer get paid to work at the church.

I feel good about where I am headed.

I read therefore I post quotes - Part II

A friend sent me a link to this article saying: “It meant something to me and I thought you might like it.”

He was right. This hit me at the right time and in the right place. Here are some quotes:

I learned to embrace the spiritual significance of my positions; I learned that no matter where I was, how lonely or obsolete the job, God was present, and sometimes more tangible than being in a church service. … I discovered that no matter where I was placed, my identity and duty were in Christ alone—without credit, without title.

Read all of “Without Credit, Without Title" here … link

Someday soon I will post something that is original to me. It will not be near as good as the quotes I have posted lately, I'm sure, but it will be mine.

I read therefore I post quotes

Dallas Willard is one of my favorite authors. His book The Divine Conspiracy had a profound impact on me. Below are a couple of quotes from an article in Christianity Today:

"Willard says that when he left the ministry to study philosophy in the early 1960s, God told him, "If you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you; but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.""

"There is knowledge of God and the spiritual nature of man, as well as other types of reality (e.g. moral obligations) that are not reducible to the world dealt with by the so-called 'natural sciences.' The idea that knowledge—and, of course, reality—is limited to that world is the single most destructive idea on the stage of life today."

"Generally, what I find is that the ordinary people who come to church are basically running their lives on their own, utilizing 'the arm of the flesh'—their natural abilities—to negotiate their way," he says. "They believe there is a God and they need to check in with him. But they don't have any sense that he is an active agent in their lives. As a result, they don't become disciples of Jesus. They consume his merits and the services of the church. … Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today."

"God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being 'right,' we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life."

Good stuff I think. You can read the rest here ... link

Which step

“ … what we need to learn is always there before us, we just have to look around us with respect and attention in order to discover where God is leading us and which step we should take next. I also learned a respect for mystery. As Einstein said, God does not play dice with the universe; everything is interconnected and has meaning. That meaning may remain hidden nearly all of the time, but we always know we are close to our true mission on earth when what we are doing is touched with the energy of enthusiasm.
If it is, then all is well. If not, then we had better change direction.”

Paulo Coelho The Zahir

The Call

“William Tyndale wrote that, if our desire is to please God, pouring water, washing dishes, cobbling shoes, and preaching the Word “is all one”.”

“The action of a shepherd in keeping sheep, performed as I have said in this kind, is as good a work before God as is the action of a judge in giving a sentence, or of a magistrate in ruling, or a minister in preaching.” (A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Men)

“We must resolutely refuse to play the word games that pretend calling means anything without a Caller. … If there is no Caller there are no callings – only work.”

“Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ,” Oswald Chambers wrote. “The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him … The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for him.”

All of the above quotes come from The Call by Os Guinness

I bought this book on September 3, 2002; the day my oldest daughter Tori got her scoliosis brace. I remember it as a heavy day. The Call had a huge impact on me then and just glancing through it today reminded me of that impact.

Jury Duty

I was called for jury duty yesterday. In the court room I sat with 59 new friends as available jurors for a criminal case to be tried starting the same day. When the prosecuting attorney asked where I was a pastor, what denomination our church belonged, and if I was an associate or senior pastor, his assistant and the defense attorney both scribbled quickly on their yellow pads of paper (lawyers really do use “legal pads”). I assumed that my fate was set and I would be kicked out of the process due to my “pastor” status. Knowing some of the pastors I know I can’t say that blame them.

As the attorneys continued in the questioning of potential jurors I started to feel sorry for the poor guy who was charged with a crime. The people in the court room had some of the most asinine answers to the questions the lawyers were asking. Then after I felt sorry for the guy on trial I started to panic, thinking they would see a pastor as a good choice since none of the other perspective jurors seemed to have any common sense.

Finally 12 capable jurors were impaneled. I left the court room with 48 other relieved people. Hopefully they passed over me due to my occupation and the preconceived ideas they perceived I would or would not have rather than passing me over based on their judgment of my intelligence.

BTW – I know I restarted this blog saying I would not write from the perspective of the paid church worker person. Even in this post, I think I have been true to what I said. I am unwilling to argue that point though.

Blog Resurrection

It has been a year since I published anything here at Stunz Blog. I know that the last post I wrote said it was the end, but I am exercising my prerogative to change my mind. I have written some in the last year but nothing like what I wrote here. So I’m back.

What I write at Stunz Blog will be written as Tommy, the individual, the follower of Jesus, the husband and the dad; rather than Tommy the guy who gets paid to work at church. I may write about church and teaching but I won’t wear the label. The writing may still read the same to most but it will definitely come from a different place inside of me.

By the way, I have a running blog and if you are in to that kind of thing you can check it out here … link.

Come back occasionally and see if you like what you read.

The End

I’ve enjoyed writing at Stunzblog for the last year and a couple of months. It is always good to end things while they’re good instead of waiting until they are completely stale. With that in mind, I am done writing on this blog. Thank you for reading, I really do appreciate it and I am grateful for what I have experienced here.

- Tommy

A bug in a shoe and hurricane victims

Yesterday morning I was sitting in the den eating breakfast and watching the news. It is heartbreaking to watch a city being slowly submerged into destruction. All of a sudden from upstairs I hear a scream. It’s Anna screaming and there is terror in her voice. This is not a “I’m playing” kind of scream. This is a serious “finger in a light socket” kind of scream. I was sure she was seriously injured.

I set down my yogurt and sprinted up the stairs. When I made it to Anna’s bedroom Andrea was already there and Anna was sitting on the floor, her shoe flung across the hall and she was yelling “A BUG!” I looked at the shoe and out of it crawled a slender bug. I walked over and stepped on it and it sounded as if I were stepping on leaves in the front yard in the fall. Anna would have told me it was from the bug’s crunchy exoskeleton if she weren’t so scared. We’ve had these discussions in the past and I wonder, "why does my first grader already know about exoskeletons"?

My heart stopped pounding and I said, “Anna, it’s just a bug.” I had no sympathy. But Andrea walked up to Anna, put her arms around her and with way more compassion than I had she said, “When I was a little girl like you I had the exact same thing happen to me. I put my shoe on and there was a bug in it and I screamed just like you did. And today I still tap my shoes and look inside to make sure there are no bugs in them before I put them on. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

Andrea had a kind of sympathy I didn’t understand because she had been where Anna was and I had not.

That’s how I feel about the victims Hurricane Katrina. I know that everyone sympathizes with them on some level but I feel that those of us on the Gulf Coast have a special kind of pain as we watch this tragedy continue to unfold. Beyond that, I think that those who have lost home, possessions, and worst of all the lives of those they love in a hurricane especially understand the pain of those in Louisiana and Mississippi; more than I ever could.

I feel helpless. I know that there are some who made a horrible mistake by staying. There are some who had no choice but to stay. There are some who ran. All of them have needs. Physical needs, emotional needs, relational needs; but more than anything they need love, mercy, grace and hope. When everything looks so dire and the future is in question the victims of the storm need hope … hope that everything can one day be okay again.

Those of you who live in Southern Brazoria County can check our church’s web sight. Very soon we will post some tangible ways to help those who are taking refuge here…. <link>

We plan to organize trips to the areas affected by the hurricane when we can be of help and not be in the way. Check back to brazospointe.com to see how you can be involved.

A logical mystic

I live my life by logic and logic alone sometimes and it gets me in trouble. Logic is not a bad thing but having a sense of logic and an absence of wonder is unhealthy.

Yesterday morning I ran 5 miles. As I turned on to Circle Way I looked at the line of deep purple just above the trees where the sun would come up in about a half an hour. The deep purple gave way to a lighter purple that faded into a dark pink that turned to white next to a deep blue that stretched to the opposite horizon. The deep blue was a canvas painted with a radiant crescent moon. Below the moon were no less that ten bats that flew in a herky jerky fashion that made me wonder how they could fly at all.

After a couple of days of totally logical life my morning run tuned me to the voice of God in the sky and the fact that I had ignored that voice long enough to be in danger of trying to live life on my own.

I need wonder. I need awe. I need the mystical. If you are a follower of Christ you do too.

You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic.
I was talking to a homeless man at a laundry mat recently, and he said that when we reduce Christian spirituality to math we defile the Holy. I thought it was very beautiful and comforting because I have never been good at math. Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.

- Don Miller Blue Like Jazz

They all realized they were in a place of holy mystery, that God was at work among them. They were quietly worshipful—and then noisily grateful, calling out among themselves, "God is back, looking to the needs of his people!"
Luke 7:16

Hotel Rwanda

I watched Hotel Rwanda yesterday. I’ve wanted to see this film since Aaron referred to it in a message at our church in February. It is a movie about the conflict in Rwanda in 1994 where the Hutu guerrillas killed over a million Tutsis in less than three months while the rest of the world just watched. They did it based on their hatred of a group of people who were outwardly just like them and yet they were labeled as something different (Hutu or Tutsi). That may be an oversimplification but it seems to me that too many people were killed needlessly.

In the movie Don Cheadle plays Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu who manages a hotel owned by Europeans. After the foreign nationals leave the hotel fearing their own safety, Rusesabagina uses it to save the lives of over 1200 Tutsis. I was moved by how a man of humility could use his influence to affect change in the people around him.

The part of the movie that stung more than any other is when a news man collects some video of the massacre that is sent abroad to be aired on the evening news. Rusesabagina says something to the effect, “When the world sees the video they will not be able to stay away. They will come and help.”
To which the cameraman replies, “No, they will see the video and say, ’How horrible’ and then they will go back to eating their dinner.”

I started reading Blue Like Jazz yesterday. As I thought about how horrible it is that something like the genocide in Rwanda happened in my adult lifetime, I read an interesting section of Miller’s book. He is talking to his friend Tony about all the people killed in Africa and Tony asked, “Do you think you could do something like that…?” Through a process of thought and conversation Miller comes to the conclusion that we are all capable of some horrible things because inside all of us exists a sin nature.

The potential for evil is inside all of us. We inherited it from Adam. At the risk of oversimplification again; the answer to the darkness in every part of the world is the redemption brought about by Jesus which has the power to change the heart. Even then we all have to act when we can.

Hotel Rwanda gave me a burden I’m not sure what to do with.

I think Jesus feels strongly about communicating the idea of our brokenness, and I think it’s worth reflection. Nothing is going to change in the Congo until you and I figure out what is wrong with the person in the mirror.

- Don Miller Blue Like Jazz

Eternal weight

I’ve been thinking about death lately. Not in a morbid way. I’m not thinking about the moment of death. I don’t plan to die anytime soon, but I wonder if I’m ready for it. I wonder if I’m ready for what is on the other side.

I look forward to stepping out of time and existing in eternity. I look forward to living without my sin nature. I look forward to living in the presence of the One who made me. But am I ready for what is there? Am I living in such a way to get me ready for what happens in forever? And can I?

Where can a dead man go?
A question with an answer only dead men know
But I’m gonna bet they never really feel at home
If they spent their lifetime learning how to live in Rome

- Nickel Creek

We do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary light affliction is producing in us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.

- Paul the Apostle

This is a test

Blogger now has an add-in where you can post directly from a Word document. That’s cool because I normally write everything I post in Word first. I’m a terrible speller and my grammar is sometimes helped by Word … and sometimes grammar check just tics me off. I think it will be cool if this works out.

Here’s the link to the add-in … link

Robbie Seay Band

Last night Phillip, Jenny, Josh, Ashley and I went to a CD release party for the Robbie Seay Band at the Taft Street Coffee House where Ecclesia meets. RSB leads worship for Ecclesia Houston. They signed with a label and now are basically releasing music that was on their independent releases.

Most of the music the Robbie Seay Band does, they wrote out of their journey with Ecclesia. The music and words are fresh and multilayered. RSB connects to the spiritual while maintaining an edge and a uniqueness that other bands seem to miss when they label themselves “Christian”. Phillip and Jenny commented that they seemed to be effortless in their playing. It was a good experience. Pick up the CD Better Days if you get a chance – you won’t be disappointed.

The Robbie Seay Band's music has been an important part of my journey over the past year.

It's good to be alive

And breathing air again