HopeForYourFamily

I find my self at Ground Zero.  Last night, I got my guitar out of the case where it has rested since Hurricane Gustav.  Wow – that’s been a while!  The short story is God has finally managed to break through the hardened crust around my heart to convict me to relinquish Facebook from my life.  In the ensuing addiction withdrawals, I have been replacing Facebooking with FaceStuffing, and have been putting on some unwanted pounds (see my previous post on The Biggest Loser).  I have a new structured exercise regimen that will begin next week – three workouts a week with a personal trainer, compliments of Pennington Biomedical Center.  But what to do with my fidgety self in the evenings?  Get out that guitar and start over!  And with that, I am re-posting the following entry.  These lessons really hit me hard as I read them again this morning.  Along with some really sore fingertips:

June 12, 2008

My lovely wife surprised me at Christmas with a guitar. My first guitar. A very nice Martin acoustic guitar – at that! She has heard me say over the years that “one of these days I’d love to learn to play the guitar,” so she decided there was no time like the present. My Dad played an acoustic guitar when I was growing up (and Mom played piano), and I’ve always been a singer, but I just never took the time to learn to play. And now I realize why.

It takes time, focus, patience, diligence – basically a lot of self-discipline. Hmmmm, where has the issue of self-discipline come up lately? But I really, really want to play guitar. No, that’s not quite the truth. The truth is, I want to be great with the guitar. It’s not that I have visions of being a famous performer with a huge following. (OK, maybe just a little – but it’s about as serious a dream as Fletch playing power forward for the Lakers!) I want to be great at the guitar, because music means so much to me, and I believe this will open up a whole avenue of experiencing and expressing my self. But what I really want to share with you are some of the life lessons I am learning from guitar lessons:

1. You don’t master anything overnight, no matter how much it matters to you. (I would argue that anything you actually can master overnight is not likely to make much of a meaningful impact on your life.) It takes time, focus, and determination to master anything worthwhile in life. Shortcuts and quick fixes do not lead to mastery. Only persistent, diligent, self-discipline leads to mastery.

2. If you really want to be good at something, you have to be willing to work on the stuff that isn’t fun and doesn’t come easy. If you are willing to toil your way through the parts that just aren’t fun and don’t come naturally, eventually you may just find yourself in the promised land where those things have become second-nature and allow you to enjoy life in ways you never could have imagined before doing all that hard work.

3. If you want to make big forward progress, you have to move at a pace you can actually sustain. Sometimes in our zeal to get where we want to be with a new life endeavor, we can push and rush ourselves so hard that we slide into the swamp of frustration and burnout, rather than steadily walking down the path to the promised land.

4. Sometimes you need to take a break and play, if you are going to have any hope of staying the course for the long haul. Just don’t forget that the playtime is a break, and that more work remains to be done. When practicing a Beatles song with rapid transitions from G to F to C have me wanting to make kindling out of my innocent six-string, it may be a good idea to blow off the Fab Four for a few minutes and play the really fun and easy chords of “Free Fallin” by Tom Petty, which requires very little thought or skill and has the benefit of leading me down the nostalgic path back to 10th grade. Ah, that was fun – now I’m ready to tackle George Harrison!

5. Humility goes a long way toward making real progress at any worthwhile pursuit in life. I can’t tell you how much I would love to quit going for my weekly guitar lessons until I have mastered everything my teacher has shown me so far. Then I could come back and really impress him! But I seriously doubt I would stick with it at this point, if I didn’t have that weekly lesson to keep me on track. And even if I did, I will progress much more quickly and learn much more, if I stick with a good teacher/mentor – which requires the humility to keep coming in week after week and demonstrate how at this point I’m not even worthy to change the guitar strings for a Hendrix or a Clapton or a Van Halen or a Vaughn. But I hope and believe that if I am willing to keep admitting each day who and where I really am, and who and where I really am not, I will grow a little better each day.

Many thanks to Ben “Obi-Wan” Hurley, my terrific guitar teacher at Zeagler Music. I am grateful for the many things I am learning from you, including guitar.

Tags: discipline, facebook, guitar, the journey

Step One: We admitted we were powerless…

Okay, God – you tell me what to do with Facebook.

Roger

Tags: discipline, facebook, freedom, hope, social networking, spiritual formation, the journey

Just wanted to let you know I have updated my “CHALLENGES” page – drawn directly from my posts on Twitter (to Facebook).  May you be blessed by the questions, challenges, and ponderings you discover here.  I would be grateful for your prayers as I consider taking steps toward publishing this work in a book.

With Hope in Him,

Roger

Tags: books, facebook, hope, the journey, twitter

I know.  For those of you who have been following me on Twitter and/or Facebook, you realize this statement comes near apostasy for me.  But what you may not realize is that I grew up in Little Rock, AR, home of Jennings Osborne and family.  Click here to get a visual tour of the world record home Christmas lights display (year after year after year) that truly makes Clark’s efforts look about as bright as a matchstick at dusk.

Reading the account on the Osborne website paints the neighbors as Grinches and themselves as altruistic. I’ll take the middle ground.  It was truly something breathtaking to behold, but the traffic was an absolute nightmare, and I don’t even want to imagine being a next-door neighbor to the Osborne compound on Cantrell.

Between viewing Christmas Vacation last night, reflecting on the otherworldly light spectacle that grew exponentially for years on end at the Jennings Osborne compound, and reading Trey Morgan’s post this morning, I have been thinking about how over the top we can go about things that have such little eternal value.  Can you imagine a world in which followers of Christ were as passionate about living in the Way of the Kingdom of Heaven as we can be about decorating for Christmas, or cheering for our favorite athletics team, or watching entertaining movies, or posting stuff on Facebook that gets lots of comments, or generally eating, drinking, and being merry?  Sorry, John Lennon – that’s the world I want to imagine!

Here’s to the prophets of living on fire for Christ today – Shane Claiborne and Francis Chan and John Eldredge and Dallas Willard and Richard Foster and Eugene Peterson and…  Who else would you put on this list?

Tags: community, compasses, culture, facebook, hope, the journey, twitter

I have seldom used my website as a place to post “prayer requests.”  Today, the Holy Spirit has laid something on my heart that I feel compelled to share with you, and to ask for your prayer support.  If you have a heart for teens – for seeing the adolescents of our day experience hope and healing and purpose and wholeness and joy and abundant living – then I am calling on you to join me in prayer.  For some, this may mean pausing momentarily as you read this post to offer a brief, one-time prayer.  Great!  For others, you may pray about this periodically throughout the rest of today and the weekend.  Thank you!  And for still others, you may be willing to write this down and commit to ongoing prayer as a matter of priority.  Bless you, sister or brother!  And here is the matter of prayer I bring before you today:

I believe God is calling me to begin a monthly round-table gathering of Christ-followers with hearts for transforming teens.

While physically, it will be limited to those within reasonable driving distance, today’s technology can be a powerful force for the Kingdom.  As I work on setting up the logistics for our gathering in Baton Rouge, I will also be working on the technological social-networking logistics that will facilitate you and those you know with a similar passion joining in on our ongoing conversation.  I see our conversation including counselors, pastors, coaches, volunteer youth workers, teachers, youth leaders themselves, pediatricians, camp staff, and more.  This call to transformational conversation is for all Christ-followers with a heart for youth, and I pray will not be limited by those particulars that the Enemy so skillfully uses to divide us – such as denominational barriers, racial discomfort and mistrust, gender lines, age, etc.

While the nature of the format and conversation will undoubtedly evolve with time as the Spirit leads us to grow together, I do have a vision for the important elements:  We will pray.  We will share our experiences of both victory and heartache regarding the teens within our spheres of contact.  We will share our God-provided gifts, strengths, and resources with one another.  We will seek the will of the Father, the way of the Son, and the wind of the Spirit.  We will respond in obedience to God’s call for us to live incarnationally among the adolescents of our world.  We will use our monthly conversation as fuel and focus for our daily mission to touch the lives of teens with God’s transforming love.

If this touches your heart-strings, and you live in the Baton Rouge area, please don’t wait to hear from me personally – contact me right away.  I will be personally reaching out to individuals and organizations throughout our community as the Spirit leads me, but it will take time.  If your heart is touched by this call, and you live out of driving range to join us in a chair, please don’t wait to hear from me personally – contact me right away.  As I said, I will be working on developing the best social networking method to actively include you in the conversation, whether it is through this website or Facebook or something else.

Above all, please pray about this call to conversation for the transformation of teens.  It is a call to faith.  It is a call to hope.  It is a call to love.  It is a call to living incarnationally among adolescents.  It is a call to action.  Thanks for being a part of this mission.  If you have even one eye or ear open these days, you know how desperate is the need.

p.s. – We now have a Facebook group.

p.p.s. – We also now have a permanent HDTV page here on my website.

Tags: adolescence, coming soon..., community, facebook, hope, teens

I have been blessed with good friends throughout my entire life, although there has been a natural ebb and flow as to which friends have been closest along the way.  New friends come along.  Some old friends stay close, while others somehow fade away.  Facebook comes along, allowing me to rekindle friendships with the brothers of week-long friends from VBS at my grandparents’ church when I was in pre-kindergarten, if I so desire.

Okay, not all “friends” are created equal, especially in the techno-communication world in which we live today.  But real friends – those brothers with whom I can share the good, the bad, and the ugly of our lives – make a profound difference in my journey.  Whether our primary point of connection comes from church, work, Men’s Fraternity, neighborhood, or other fellowship, these are the guys who help me live up to my best.  And I really want to live up to my best.

Just a few months ago, a friend of mine sent me a G-mail instant message that sparked a dialogue that simply couldn’t be resolved via such an impersonal format.  (I believe the topic was, “What is the nature of the Trinity?”  Light stuff, right?)  We decided Raising Cane’s (home of the best chicken fingers and dipping sauce on the planet – sorry Guthrie’s lovers from Tuscaloosa) was a much better place of enlightenment.  As we left, we talked about how much we enjoy sharing meaningful conversation, and that we should get together more often.  He half-jokingly said we could start getting together every week at the same time for coffee and someday be like the old men who have clearly been sharing a weekly coffee fellowship for decades.

Thankfully, his comment stayed with both of us, and within a couple weeks we had decided on a time for coffee that we thought could become regular.  A couple of months later, we are now part of the regular Friday morning crowd at our favorite caffeine-ery, and have now added a third member to our fellowship.  The “new guy” is actually the friend who connected the other two of us in the first place.

I share all of this to simply say this.  There really is nothing quite like knowing I have a true brother or two that I will be seeing each week, with no agenda, but the simple freedom to be my self and share what is on my mind, be it serious, silly, exciting, or mundane.  Have a drink or two, share some laughs, wrestle with a few matters of faith and family, witness a bit of light mayhem in the establishment, whatever.  Once upon a time, I remember a song along these lines that became more than a little popular…

How have your most meaningful friendships been built?  How are you a different person because of your friendships?

Tags: coffee, facebook, friends, manhood, social networking

I have been reflecting, of late, on the impact and significance of new communication technologies / social networking tools in our culture. The Internet itself, blogs, email, instant messaging, texting, i-phones, Blackberries, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Communication in Western culture has changed exponentially in my lifetime, and I am only 35!

Yesterday I shared a link to a video that gives a rather unnerving, satirical viewpoint on Twittering, the micro-blogging phenomenon of which I have been a part now for maybe two or three months. Today I am glad to share with you how all this high-tech instant communication can be a part of a real relationship where coffee is imbibed, stories are shared, theology is hammered out, and friendship is deepened.

Last week as I was going through my emails at the office, I got an instant message (G-mail style) from a good friend of mine. It was one of those “Wazzup?” kind of messages. Rather quickly, this simple correspondence evolved into some genuine theological discussion. My Catholic friend had been talking to his Pentecostal co-worker about the Trinity, and he was curious to hear my non-denominational, evangelical take on it. I quickly suggested to him that a late lunch at Raising Cane’s was required if this was to go any further. (For those of you living outside the range of Cane’s, you are sadly missing out on the finest chicken fingers and dipping sauce known to the free world. Guthrie’s in Tuscaloosa, AL holds a close second.)

The conversation was spirited, heartening, and rather deep. As we were leaving, my buddy commented that we really should do this more regularly, kinda like the old guys who have breakfast every Friday morning at Frank’s, or IHOP, or whatever. We both laughed, but agreed he was onto something, and left with an undefined hope of continuing this dialogue.

So yesterday he sends me another G-mail instant message, clarifying the Trinitarian view of his Pentecostal colleague, etc. Before we finished the online conversation, we had set up a standing weekly appointment for coffee on Friday mornings at 6:30. I sense real, lasting friendship in the making – the kind that doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore in our culture of surface relationships and conversational skimming. We’ll see.

My point today is this: tools make whatever impact they make based on how they are used by the tool-wielder. All this communication technology can easily be used as a substitute for real relationships while giving the appearance of many friendships. But it can be a helpful method for real people to make real progress in deepening real relationships over real coffee. Bottoms up!

Tags: coffee, culture, facebook, friends, media, social networking, texting, twitter

If you know me, or read my blog with any regularity, you know I have a passion for helping families navigate the evolving sea of entertainment/media/technology in as healthy a manner as possible. One huge portion of this evolving world is the vast expanse of online “social networking” sites, with MySpace and Facebook still leading the field. I have shared previously my perspectives on these sites, with recommendations for parents. Today I write, not just as a media/family expert and critic, but as a social networking participant – a Facebooker.

One of the differences (among many) between Facebook and MySpace is that Facebook really presents itself as essentially tamer and not quite as edgy as MySpace. Sure, people post their party pics, share wisecracking “bumper stickers,” and post links to favorite videos and such. But the Facebook experience somehow seems less given to some of the worst of the MySpace experience. (MySpace is certainly not all bad, by the way.) Well, I am pleased to share with you a recent experience that really encouraged me regarding Facebook’s desire and efforts to remain a positive social networking experience. I was looking for the profile of someone who was not on my official “friends” list. When I entered her name, I saw a profile list of a dozen or so people with the same name. One of these individuals had a very sexually revealing and provocative picture on their profile image, and I immediately reported it to Facebook, which they readily encourage in such situations. Facebook’s stock just went up in my view, when they responded within a couple days and pulled the offensive image.

Way to go, Facebook! No, they can’t police everything everyone does on such a vast social network, nor should they. But they can maintain certain limits on what can be shared for all to see, and I am impressed to see how willing they are to do so. Happy Facebooking!

Tags: adolescence, culture, facebook, media, social networking, teens

My good friend, Blaine, the youth minister at our church, has informed me that I am the one out of the loop.  MySpace is still big, but Facebook is rapidly becoming the big boy on the online community block.

Tags: adolescence, community, facebook, media, parenting, social networking, teens

If you are not familiar with MySpace, you are out of the loop. If you are a parent of children under the age of 25 or so, and you are not familiar with MySpace…Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Stop right now and take time to get educated. A good parent tutorial is available through the National Institute on Media and the Family, a source I highly recommend for equipping parents and families on a wide range of media/family related issues. Another great resource for research based information and recommendations regarding families, entertainment, and health is the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. A third excellent resource is the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding. But encouraging you to familiarize yourself with this huge online community is not really the point of today’s post. I want to share some reflections/lessons I have taken from my experience of MySpace (not actually having a MySpace page myself).

1. Our young people are desperate for relationships. Just look at the size of the “friends” list on the typical MySpace page, and how quickly it grows in the course of a month. Parents and other mentors, this is a great opportunity for us! Provided you approach them with a genuine love and acceptance for who they are, and a healthy respect for the importance of their friends in their lives, your children really are thirsty for a relationship with you. Don’t be intimidated by the electronic gadgetry of their lives. Be there.

2. Music is so personal and important in the lives of our young people. Spend any time navigating the waters of MySpace, and you will hear an amazing array of musical styles, themes, and expressions. Listen to the music. Hear the words of the songs (www.azlyrics.com is a helpful resource). Feel the emotions. Like it or not, this is the expression of their hearts and lives. Don’t just dismiss it or condemn it. Take it to heart, and let it lead you closer to the hearts of the young people you love.

3. Young people are willingly making their lives “open books.” The question is…will we invest the time it takes to read them?

4. Young people are spending vast amounts of time online. Look at how much work is put into MySpace pages, and how constant the dialog is on the message boards. Although I recognize there are multiple reasons for the growing obesity epidemic in America, particularly among young people, spending hours a day online has got to be a big factor.

5. Young people are creating their own world, language, and view of life – and it is a whole other reality from the general adult culture. For a much deeper, and not particularly pleasant, insight into this phenomenon, read “Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenager” by Chap Clark.

6. YOUNG PEOPLE NEED YOU! There is no better place to invest your time and energy than in our children and adolescents – and you don’t have to stop with your own. They need us to be there for them, loving and guiding and accepting and challenging and believing in them. Many are literally dying for us to invest in them. When you have a few minutes, and you are ready to be inspired, check out www.makeadifferencemovie.com (OK, the music and narrator’s voice are a little cheesy and may remind you of “Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handy,” but don’t let that keep the story from inspiring you.)

With Hope – Always,

Roger

Tags: adolescence, community, facebook, media, parenting, social networking, teens