Danny J Bixby

>I’ve been listening to a lot of Kings of Leon lately. They’re a great band. One particular song has really struck me, “Use Somebody.”

I think this would make a great offering song at church some week.

I feel challenged and empowered by this song. God’s been using it to speak to me in a way that I haven’t experienced in a long time. And i’m pretty uneasy about it.

Maybe you’ll hear something in it too.

Kings Of Leon – Use Somebody from Devin Hardy on Vimeo.

>So my parents have arrived in Springtown today. Brooke is incredibly excited, she loves when they come to visit. It’s hard for her as she only gets to see them about once a year since they live overseas. She actually hasn’t visited with my Dad for two years now, although she does talk to both of them periodically on the web cam. Last year she was shy when they showed up, and today they picked her up from daycare with Jenny and she was very excited. We’ve had a chart the last week and have been counting down the days.

I’d say I have a good relationship with my parents. I feel that my mom, dad and I all respect each other and able to talk about serious and important things. That we’re able to be honest and open with each other while being comfortable in our discussions. This hasn’t always been the case. Perhaps because I know that this used to be unacceptable is what makes me notice it now. Maybe it’s because Jenny and I are friends with many couples that are significantly older than we are that I feel comfortable just hanging out and talking with my parents. I don’t know, but several of our friends do point out periodically that they’re old enough to be our parents, or that they’ve been together as long as Jenny and I have been alive, etc etc.

Anyway, my relationship with my parents hasn’t always been that great. I do remember the turning point in it though. I was a sophomore in college and I don’t know the exact circumstances that led to it, but I wrote a long email to my dad one day. I guess I was reminiscing about growing up and living at home, but I wasn’t exactly homesick. I just felt that I had never properly given him acknowledgment for being there for me…you know? So I wrote this long email telling him about significant memories I had of him, things that I remember he taught me, life lessons that stuck with me then (and still do), thanking him for being a dad that was involved and around and genuinely cared for me and my brothers. I wanted him to feel that he had done a good job. To feel a sense of pride and accomplishment.

He panicked.

I had never communicated with my dad in this fashion before, and he was caught off guard by it. He called me later that evening very shaken up by it. He thought that the letter was a dramatic way of me “saying my goodbyes” and that I was going to kill myself. He was very emotionally distraught and took a bit of convincing that that wasn’t the case.

I suppose it was a natural reaction. I never really talked about anything significant before with him. I wasn’t depressed or anything, I just wasn’t a very emotionally open person. I’m still not. That’s always been one of my shortcomings; I keep most thoughts, problems, issues to myself. So suddenly telling my dad all of these important things was very out of character for me and it threw out a giant warning siren telling him that something was wrong.

I don’t fault him for thinking that, in fact it showed a little more about his character. I saw it as even though he was reading about all these positive memories I had of him, all he ended up doing was worrying about me. That he didn’t get into the pride or a sense of accomplishment because he didn’t feel that his job was over. That he still needed to take care of me and look out for me.

I hope I can be that selfless in my thoughts and desires with Brooke as my dad has been with me. I think of how much easier and different growing up would have been if I had only felt comfortable to talk to my parents about actual problems as opposed to surface level nonsense. I hope (maybe foolishly) that I can create an environment for Brooke where she’ll feel able to as she’s growing up. At least a little bit.

You sometimes hear parents say to their kids when they are angry that they hope “one day you’ll have kids who behave just like you do.” They pronounce it over their children as if it’s some kind of curse….usually because their kids are being tremendous tools at the time. I hope to be the same kind of parent to Brooke as my parents are to me. I just hope that it doesn’t have to wait until she’s almost 20 (or later) before it happens.

>Mondays devour my soul. They bring to a level of exhausted boredom that I am surprised week after week is actually possible. I want to go home and hug my little girl.

>So. The emerging church. All the cool kids are doing it these days. It’s become one of those buzz phrases in religious circles and especially those on these great interwebs. But what the crap is it?

I have no idea. And you know what, neither does anyone else.

Sure you can look up things at emergent village or at wikipedia if you’d like to know some history behind this very VERY intentionally unorganized and unspecific ‘movement’ amongst modern Christians. You can do all kinds of searches, read plenty of books “about” it and just end up scratching your head. So many experts on this movement have different things to say, different presumptions that are being brought to the table, different conclusions and at the end of the day just plain end up contradicting each other about what the emerging church actually IS.

It’s even popular now to say that the emerging church movement is dying or already dead. Which is neat considering that most accept it to be less than a 20 year old movement.

It’s hard to define a movement that doesn’t have structure. Sure you can look at the personal theologies of the more prominent pastors/authors in the movement such as Brian McLaren or Rob Bell. But the ideas they present are echoed by far more than just those who would refer to themselves as “emergent” or “emerging.”

There is one thing that the emerging church most certainly is: liberal. I’ve found liberal to be a funny word, mostly being that I most often hear the word from the lips or the writings of those who would be mortified to be classified as liberal themselves because of how they view it. Usually using the word to describe someone else or an idea contrary to their own. And a majority of the time, using it with a connotation that the word “liberal” is actually some sort of an insult. I’ve yet to figure out why that would be, other than just a misinterpretation of what “liberal” actually means.

I enjoy what liberal actually means. Go ahead if you don’t believe me, look it up. I prefer Dictionary.com personally. The first of the many definitions found there is “favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.” That is why it is so difficult to define the emerging church movement, it is constantly in a state of progress or reform.

There seems to be little requisite to consider yourself “emergent” other than looking at “the Church” and thinking to yourself that something is not right. That something needs to change. Some reform must happen here. That you can look at the modern Church and compare it to the Church of the New Testament and even to the teachings of Jesus and say to yourself that something doesn’t quite add up. To feel a conviction that this is not how things are supposed to be, and this is NOT ok to continue on like it. There are “emergent” churches tucked away in all kinds of denominations, and many who don’t even realize they are a part of this “movement.” There are “emergent” Christians in all kinds of congregations and I’m willing to bet that they are the first ones burnt out, and the ones that are the hardest to hold onto.

I didn’t know there was even such a thing called the emerging church until a few months ago. I have unknowingly read many of the authors associated with it…but they don’t really associate themselves with the movement (Don Miller and Mark Driscoll come to mind). So I have very little information actually on it. But what I do know, is that I identify with a lot (not all) of what these authors and pastors have to say. It resonates with me. Is it because I am so disdainful of what I interpret the modern Church of having become that I’ll attach to anything that demands it be different? Am I just gullible or easily manipulated by hippies?

A person that I follow on twitter posted this today, “After a talk w/ Christian coworkers this morn, it amazes me how ppl who claim to study & follow Jesus can b so hateful & judgmental!” Jenny (my wife, not the person who wrote that above) is constantly bemoaning the hatred and bigotry that she witnesses at her work from fellow Christians. All you have to do is turn on television or do a quick search online to get a view of what the ‘unchurched’ sees when they look at the Church. It’s not love, that’s for sure. I can say that is what I think of when I think about “the Church” and I’m even a part of it. Imagine what someone who is not a part of it thinks when they don’t have access to ‘the good parts.’ Hate. With a capital “H.”

To me it’s not about using post-modernism to redefine Christianity. It’s not about embracing culture and syncretizing it with religious beliefs and practices. It’s not about some pure social justice and saying “who cares what the motivation is behind it.” It’s not about taking modern science, pitting it against Christianity and demanding that one trump the other, and damn the consequences or how stupid we look! It’s not about claiming a moral or ethical superiority over those whom you judge to have ‘lost their way’ or are ‘going down the wrong path.’ It’s not a matter of us and them.

It’s about authenticity. It’s about truth. It’s about compassion. It’s about changing lives. It’s about Love. With a capital “L.” At the risk of being cliche, it’s only found in Jesus. Only. And we’re not progressing his kingdom if we can’t share and exhibit his traits of true authentic compassionate love. That’s what being “emergent” is. Progressing and reforming and trying as hard as possible to become more and more like Jesus.

Jenny, Brooke and I have been lucky enough to find a place in Springfield that does that (i’m not saying there are not others). Where the authenticity of the leaders is so palpable that it smacks you in the face. Where it is all about changed lives. Where the church’s only goal is to assist in whatever way possible in helping God reconcile the world to himself through compassion and love as opposed to intolerance and hate. We’ve been lucky enough to stumble upon an “emerging” church that happens to be cleverly (albeit poorly) masquerading as an Assemblies of God church at the epicenter of the AG denomination.

If
you’re interested, i’ll let you know where it is.

>This can be a bit long, detailed and uninteresting, but I assure you that it will actually go somewhere. Bear with me. And no, “justice” won’t be a recurring theme, it is just a coincidence…..maybe.

So, like an ever increasing number of people my age and gender (that being male and approximately age 0-200) I am a bit of a nerd. I’m not a geek, I’m not into all kinds of tech savvy things, but I do nerdy things such as play a lot of video games. One of these games is called Astro Empires, and I’ve been playing it in one capacity or another for the past 4 years. I currently play on the Delta server with about 5000 other people. And I’m very good. Very. I was ranked #1 on the server for a period of about 6 months, and have been consistently in the top 10 for the entire age of the server, which today is 586 days old.

A few weeks ago this changed. I was traveling from one part of the universe to another on a week long journey when my fleet was ambushed by a rival guild. I had no idea it was happening, I was at my computer at work, but not in the game at the moment. This game like many others is a ‘persistent universe’ meaning that things can happen to you while you’re not logged in. Anyway, a sizable portion of my fleet was destroyed before my guild mates started to send me instant messages on MSN (remember, nerd?) to tell me I was being blown up. I logged on to be able to save a few of my ships and send them elsewhere to safety, but I had been pretty well destroyed. All in all, I lost about 19 million fleet (about 1/2 of what I had), to say I was angry would be a bit of an understatement.

So for the past few weeks, our guild has been tracking the guild of those who ambushed me, and have been planning to return the favor with our particular brand of “internet space ship game justice.” This happened yesterday. We had a coordinated launch of about 50 of us mid morning around 10. Landed around 5 pm for a 2nd launch. Landed around 12:30 am for a 3rd launch. Landed yet again around 3:30 am today for the fourth and final launch towards one of that guild’s main fleet gatherings. We do several smaller launches to limit the amount of time they can see us coming. And so last night, I went to bed after launching around 12:30 am and set an alarm for 3 hours later in the middle of the night to administer some space justice. And boy, did our internet space ships whallop the crap out of theirs. Our attack started at about 4am, we killed off about 350 million of that guild’s fleet, which was about 1/8 of their total while losing about 100 million of our own which was about 1/16 of our total. They are a guild twice our size, and we will destroy them, we have done this before to others, many times. That is now our goal for the game and it will not change until they are approximately half of our size. We are perfectly capable of this because we are easily the best guild in the game, made up of the best players, who are quite willing to wake up at 3:30am to get revenge on someone they don’t know on the internet.

So, why did I waste your time with this nonsense? Because it’s surprisingly important. When I was ambushed, I was furious. I was depressed. I was anxious. It had destroyed my day. It was about all I could think about for the rest of the day, and some of the next. This was not just some thing that happened in some game, it elicited a genuine emotional response. If I knew one of the people who had attacked me, I very well may have punched them in the face. And then kicked their dog. This could be because I really “get into” the games that I play. It could be because I’m a bit of a (ok, huge) nerd. It could be because I’m a bit of an angry person. Or, as I suspect, it could be because I’m pretty normal.

I took pride in my good position in the game. In this online, pointless game. I had placed a small sense of self worth into this game, and when it had been taken away from me I felt helpless and angry. And when we made our attack early this morning, my guild imparted that same feeling onto dozens of other players. I’m sure many of them will quit the game because of this (it’s quite normal actually). They won’t feel that they can handle the loss of what occurred, and instead of dealing with it and rebuilding they will simply quit. They will be angry, they will be anxious, depressed and unable to adequately deal with the situation for a short period of time. Just because of a few internet space ships.

It is not just this game, and it is not just me. I think one of the main reasons people play video games is because it is a form of escapism. They get to ignore what is going on around them or to them, if only for a little while and change their identity to whatever it is in the game. This is not something only ‘socially challenged’ people do, or only a small amount of people, or only teenagers or anything ridiculous such as that. The average age of a video gamer is 33, over 60% of Americans play video games regularly, nearly 1/3 of them are female, and in the last 6 months there have been more people who have played a video game than gone to see a movie (source: The Internet). World of Warcraft has over 11 million users, meaning that if it were a country it would be in the top 75 in size. And no matter the intensity of the game, there are plenty of people who get a very real emotional response from playing it; sometimes positive, and sometimes negative.

Mine today was positive. I was happy. I went back to bed at 4:45am very pleased with what had happened and quite content. But for me to be happy with the result, someone else has to be unhappy with it. And unless the game is something along the lines of ‘virtual T-ball,’ where there is no score, that is the way it is with every game. There’s always a winner, there’s always losers. Whether it’s people playing head to head against each other, or if it’s only measured in terms of score without a real competition. Even if it is only a goal established in the mind of an individual player of something in the game they need to accomplish and the only comparison is to himself. If they accomplish it they will be a winner, if not they will be a loser. And they will probably receive the appropriate emotional response.

So we keep playing. We just may get the positive emotional response from it instead of a negative one. We may feel accomplished. We may feel important. In something as insignificant as a video game. Yet that sense of importance or accomplishment is sought after. If even only a little bit.

Or we might just keep playing because it’s fun and there is little else to do while at the office.

>In a not too subtle plea for attention earlier today on facebook I posted a question of whether I should start a blog, and I received this gem of a response:

Scrawled by Elizabeth Boemler ’round about 2:00 in the evenin’ Merry Month o’ June 24