Review: How To Use Lift for iPhone as a Spiritual Aid

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One of my favorite verses in the Bible comes from the book of Hebrews. It reads, "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." (12:11) Nobody enjoys discipline because, by definition, it goes against our natural inclinations. This proves to be true whether we're talking about working out more or reading our Bible. Because of the way the central nervous system is wired, habit formation is one of the most difficult things for the brain to develop. We don't want to change. But according to Scripture, on the other side of discipline is freedom, blessing, peace, and joy.

This being resolution season and all, it seems like everyone's trying to develop new habits right now. Just drive by your local gym if you don't believe me. But starting is easy. It's the sticking-with-it part that we tend to find impossible. How do you keep from giving up after a week? Well, here's a little trick I've been using lately that might help with that.

Old Spice Jesus

True story, I have a shameless love for these videos. I realize they're, like, years old at this point, but whatever. Old Spice has my business as long as Isaiah Mustafa keeps dressing up in that glorious towel. Fickle? Maybe. Ok, definitely. But it's so much fun that I honestly don't care.

This morning, I asked myself the question that has been keeping the entire Western world up at night since this video debuted: what would these commercials sound like if they aired in first-century Palestine? What if Jesus decided to borrow Isaiah Mustafa's glorious towel (thereby making it a Glorious Towel?) and used it to make his own sales pitch for following him?

I imagine it would have sounded a little like this.

Remember, O Man, That You Are Dust

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the Lenten season. Unless you’re a zealously devout Catholic, chances are your idea of Lent is either

A) the past tense of the word “lend,”


B) your grandma yelling at you for forgetting you’re not supposed to eat meat on Fridays, or


C) the stuff you find in you pants pockets.


And that's understandable. The liturgical calendar isn’t exactly the sexiest thing in the world (nobody’s going to confuse it for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar), and nobody really talks about it much outside of the Catholic church. But it's also a shame. Everybody pays attention to Easter, you can't fully understand Easter without also understanding Lent. And just as Advent points us to Christmas, Lent prepares us for the passion of Holy Week and the joy of Easter Morning.


The purpose of lent is not to become super-holy by fasting from your vice of choice. The purpose of lent is to remember. To remember that Easter is not primarily about fluorescent colors and chocolate bunnies. To remember that life is not mostly a story about me. To remember that “we are dust, and to dust we shall return.’ Lent is about actively reminding myself that what Jesus did on the cross matters to me on a daily basis, to the extent that I'm going out of my way to remove things that distract me from the heaviness of that truth. Ultimately, Lent is about getting my eyes off me and fixing them on Jesus.


With that in mind, here are a few things to keep in mind during Lent this year.

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An Open Letter to Tim Tebow

Photo: SI.com

Dear Tim,

I imagine this hasn’t been an easy week for you. Not that I imagine you’ve had many easy weeks since you made the jump from Heisman-winning college quarterback to one of the most controversial prospects to enter the NFL in years. It seems like every time I turn on the TV, Merrill Hodge or Skip Bayless or some talking head on ESPN is railing about how you’ll never be a real NFL quarterback, blah blah blah. Whatever. But after that ugly loss to the Lions on Sunday, I reckon you’re feeling the heat a bit more than usual right now.

I don’t know if you’re aware of this (read: sarcasm), but you are the Kim Kardashian of the sports world right now. Everybody and their mother has an opinion about you. Even people who don’t know football know who you are and the ongoing saga that’s playing out in Denver right now. That’s got to be weird for you. I guess it’s part of being in the spotlight, but that doesn’t make it any less weird to think of millions of people whom you don’t know are constantly talking about whether or not you’re any good. 


I’m not interested in debating the mechanics of your throwing motion or whether or not your skills translate to the NFL’s style of play. My dad always taught me that if you work hard good things will happen for you, and I have little doubt that your hard work will one day pay off for you. That’s not why I’m writing this.

3 Things I Learned From My Facebook Break

Last month, I decided to take a break from Facbook. My life was getting busier, and when I made the call to step away from some of the more superfluous things in my life, Facebook was one of the first things to go. What followed was the first time in years that I'd been away from the social networking giant. To say the least, it was an enlightening time for me. Here’s what I discovered during my month away.

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Bless This Mess

Probably my favorite memory of the summer was the night Jeff and I drove up to Fishtown to see Dave Bazan. Jeff is a big Bazan fan and has been for some time, while I’ve never been very familiar with the former Pedro the Lion frontman’s work. But Jeffrey is my go-to guy when it comes to good music, so when he invited me to join him for the band’s Philly concert, I agreed to tag along. That night in June we drove up to the city with the windows down, maneuvering our way through the various boroughs of North Philly until we arrived at Johnny Brenda’s. Once inside, we grabbed a few beers and wiggled through the crowd for good placement just as the opening band was finishing up their set, and soon after they were followed by Bazan and his band. I only knew the handful of songs Jeff had been playing for me throughout the week, but they sounded fantastic and put on a really great show.

After multiple pleads for an encore, Bazan came back out by himself to play a few more songs for the hipster crowd, ending with "Hard to Be." And I remember those final moments of the show being curiously surreal: me standing there with about 200 or so twentysomethings in skinny jeans and plaid shirts, all of us singing together with one voice about the tragedy of the human condition…

You’ve heard the story, you know how it goes
Once upon a garden, we were lovers with no clothes
Fresh from the soil, we were beautiful and true
In control of our emotions til we ate the poisoned fruit

And now it's hard to be, hard to be
Hard to be a decent human being

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More than ever, I’ve spent this summer coming to terms with the depths of my own depravity. It seems like every time I turn around, I’m being reminded of just how twisted and broken I am. My actions, my words, my thoughts and emotions…everything within me is contaminated, selfish to the core. And these defects I possess affect everything and everyone with whom I come in contact with on a daily basis. This is further complicated by the fact that I call myself a Christian, and when you call yourself a Christian you set for yourself a certain standard of living by which other people hold you accountable to, and it becomes much harder to be open about your shortcomings than before. You eventually end up trying to hide all the imperfect things about your life, because if you don’t you will make Jesus look bad, and the weight of your iniquities becomes increasingly unbearable. 

It’s for this reason that another Bazan song, "Bless This Mess," has been my constant companion this summer. The lyrics are simple: “God bless the man who stumbles / God bless the man who falls / God bless the man who yields to temptation.” I love this because in very simple words, Dave Bazan is telling my story back to me. I am the man who stumbles. I am the man who falls. I am the man who yields to temptation. I am, by all accounts, a complete and total mess. Because like we sang that night in Fishtown, it’s hard to be a decent human being. And so I sing “Bless This Mess” because it is the only hope I have to hold onto. I am not “decent.” I do not deserve kindness, or mercy, or unfailing grace. My only hope is that the God of the universe will bless this mess, sparing me the judgment that is due me and providing me with strength to make it through the day. 

It’s true what they say about Jesus, you know: he saves. We don’t have to be good enough any more. Grace is free. And that means messes like me have the kind of hope that has substance to it. I really have been rescued. Christ really has paid my debt. And I may be a mess, but thankfully that is not the end of the story. Because grace was designed for messes like me.

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Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven

[Photo: Jon Schoonover]

Fact: I’ve never been a fan of street evangelism. Meeting people for the first time is awkward enough for me. Adding a full retelling of the Gospel story to that experience is enough to make me unwittingly tinkle my trousers in a very public place. And once that happens...well, you might as well call it a night, because nobody's listening to anybody with a ginormous pee stain on his pants. You can try to say you spilled water on yourself, but they will know you are lying and say they'd better be going, and there's no way you're getting a second date out of that. Not that I'd know anything about that sort of thing.

But it's not just that street evangelism makes me nervous. The whole philosophy behind it seems off to me. 

When you really think about it, asking somebody if they want to go to heaven when they die is kind of a stupid question. It’s like asking someone if they’d like a million dollars. “Hello, sir, would you like a million dollars?” “No, but thanks very much for asking.” It’s almost insulting to pose it as a question that requires a yes-or-no answer. Nobody’s turning that offer down. So why do so many street evangelism teams start conversations by asking if someone would like to know for sure that they would go to heaven when they died? What are they going to say, no?

This is besides the fact that such a statement is more than a little manipulative on the part of the evangelist. Since no one is going to say no to such a question, they have no choice but to listen to the evangelist’s entire spiel about Jesus and forgiveness and sin. Is this really the way Christians should start off relationships with people they want to connect with? By doing their best impression of a door-to-door salesman, hoodwinking them into believing this Good News of ours? And being a bother about it to boot?

I know that’s not the intention. But that’s how it looks. At least to me.

The Gospel of Jesus is simple, but it is not simplistic. You can’t just explain it to somebody in ten minutes, pray a quick prayer, and move on to the next person. Relationships need to be cultivated. Trust needs to be established. Love needs to be demonstrated. We don’t just tell people about Jesus. We become the incarnate Jesus to them. We bandage the wounded. We free the slave. We hang out with the outcast (not to be confused with Outkast, although that would be cool too). Street evangelism does none of those things. It's the drive-thru version of Christianity: conveniently packaged, but ultimately unsatisfying.

I'm not saying that no good can ever come from street evangelism. But I do want to point out how incredibly difficult it is to love somebody well in that kind of environment, along with how incredibly difficult it is to not pee yourself while doing it. Both are bad. Especially on dates. Not that I'd know anything about that sort of thing.

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Who Cares About Advent?

Have you ever wondered why Christmas Day can seem like such a letdown sometimes? Sure, everybody does the presents thing, you get the day off from work and school, families get together to eat and watch some TV…maybe your Uncle Teddy has a little too much eggnog and passes out in the tub. But with all of the hype surrounding Christmas, with all of the effort we go put into making it a really big to-do, there are times when the day itself just seems sort of…empty. For all the hype surrounding Christmas, we’re often left trying to manufacture joy on Christmas Day, sitting in our living room surrounded by half-opened boxes of gifts and wondering along with Charlie Brown what all the fuss was about.

Why is this? Why do we get so excited around Christmas time, but feel so utterly confused when Christmas actually comes? Why do we get the sense that we’re like dogs chasing a car, unsure of what to do once we finally catch it?

The answer is simple. If we want to understand Christmas, we've got to understand the significance of Advent.

Vice Versus

“We all have our vices, don’t we?” The lady across the counter from me is moreso trying to justify her actions than speak philosophically to me as she orders her Double Chocolate Chip Frappuccino. I kind of nod along, not really sure if she wants me to respond or not. I’m new at the café so I’m still meeting the regulars, but apparently this woman comes in all the time and loooves her frappuccinos. Despite the fact that chocolate doesn’t sit well in her system, she refuses to be denied her guilty pleasure of the day. It is, as she herself pointed out, her “vice.”

Recently I heard one of my professors describe vice as “an act that’s profitable to you only and no one else.” When he said that, a light came on for me. I used to think vice was just another word for sin, something that referred to bad things you did. But this definition explains why vices are bad: they are repetitive acts of selfishness. Acts of vice move solely to satisfy you without giving others a second thought.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy yourself a Twix bar unless you’re buying enough to share with the class (unless I’m in that class…then I'm totally saying that). I’m talking about continual patterns of behavior. A vice isn’t something you do once; it’s something you go back to again and again, like the lady in the café. Essentially, our vices are the crutches we’ve constructed to deal with the pain of life. But there’s also a transaction that takes place here. While our vices make us feel better, they also eat away at us. We’re fine with it, though, because we don’t want to feel lonely or sad or powerless…not if we can help it, anyway. So we make an exchange, choosing to indulge in a fake happiness rather than endure the wait that often precedes real joy.

If nothing else, I think this understanding of vice gives us a great benchmark to measure ourselves against. As a personal experiment today, look back on the last week and ask yourself the question, “What did I do this past week that was solely intended to please me? How did those actions affect the people around me, either directly or indirectly?” Your probing probably won’t unearth anything you didn't already know. We’re not so much unaware of our vices as we are unwilling to name them for what they are. So long as our strongholds retain a sense of ambiguity, we're not responsible to change (or so we think). So naming them becomes the first step in breaking their control over our lives. True vices don't go away overnight, so we should expect some measure of struggle and probably failure along the way. But they are not insurmountable. Despite its difficulty, the recipe for change is a simple one: time, patience, and a whole lot of prayer.


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