Thoughts On Church

A couple weeks ago I went to my parents' church for one of their revival services and as I was sitting in the pew, a few thoughts ran through my mind.

1 - What is the purpose of the offertory song? Is it to provide a time for people to quietly talk amongst themselves? Is it so people can sit back and enjoy a six minute song? No, I'm pretty sure it's there so that some sound can be heard for about ninety seconds other than the sound of money clinking into the plates. So, that being the true purpose, why do churches insist on having such insanely long piano/organ offertory songs?! It literally takes at the most ninety seconds to pass the plates, and after that people just sit there and feel awkward for the other four and a half minutes. It's insane and it must stop.

2 - What is the purpose of a "revival"? Is it to revive the church or to bring in non-believers so that they can hear the gospel? It has to be one or the other. If it's to revive the believers, then don't tell people to bring their friends, because their friends probably aren't Christians, and they don't need to bring them to church so they can hear about how to be a Christian in the workplace (no lie, thats what one entire night of the revival was about). However, if the revival is to bring in people off the street, then the sermons should be geared towards them. There's a time and a place for preaching, and there's a time and a place for teaching. To me this sounds like an incredibly common sense thing, but for some reason churches have a tendancy to mix them up. One of the first steps to sermon preparation is knowing your audience!

Are you cool??

In the almost two years I have now spent on facebook, I have come to one completely solid conclusion: your level of coolness is directly proportional to the number of wall posts you have received from members of the opposite sex. Guys like to think that every time a girl even looks their way, she's interested in them; therefore, they look at their entire wall filled with posts from girls and they know that they are cool. I mean, what guy wants to have only guy facebook friends and get only wall posts from other guys? The answer is none of them. So add up your wall posts from the opposite sex and if they outnumber the ones from the same sex, you're cool. FYI: I'm the man!

McDonald's...psh

Well I missed dinner tonight, and I ended up getting caught up in some tv shows and didn't leave to get food until 10pm. Now this is what I do usually once a week or so, head to McDonald's for some late night snacks because they're the only place open 24 hours. And I've noticed that it always takes FOREVER. Granted, it's right at a busy intersection, but come on...I blame it on crappy staff. So anyway, I went tonight and noticed two things about this glorious restaurant chain. First, I'm pretty sure they only make a one-size-fits-all shirt for the employees. I tend to like tighter shirts that don't have the short sleeves hanging down way past your elbows, but every single person I've ever seen working at a McDonald's is wearing a huge shirt. Either they only make one size, or the thug people who work there like to wear bulky clothes so they can hide guns and drugs in them. Second, the people who work inside never ever ever ever ever look at the person sitting at the drive-thru window until their food is ready to be handed over. The lady handed me my food tonight and turned around to prepare the next order just as I discovered that my burger had onions on it. So I'm holding up the burger, frantically trying to make eye contact with the 3 people standing inside and not one of them looks over at me. Finally, the next order is ready and the woman walks over to the window, opens it, and halfway handed me another bag of food before she realized that I was the same customer as before. Somebody needs to tell the McDonald's employees to work on their people skills before somebody gets mad and throws the food back through the window at them.

People are idiots.

What's the deal with this whole "Don't Buy Gas on May 15th" thing? Why are people such sheep when it comes to things like this? It's been done many times before and it's NEVER WORKED. People drive automobiles. Automobiles require gas. It doesn't matter if you buy gas today or next Thursday, you're still going to buy the gas because you need it. So who cares if a million people don't pump gas on the 15th? That means they're all filling up the day before or the day after, so the companies aren't losing anything!! To really make any tiny difference at all, you'd have to get everyone to stop buying gas from one particular vendor so that they would lower their prices slightly. Good lord, if I worked at a gas company I'd be laughing my butt off at these morons sending around this e-mail and making facebook and myspace groups.

Currently laughing at...

• Global warming
• Dumb liberal teachers who try to interject their views in class
• Guys who try to look tough by not smiling in pictures
• Girls doing the whole "You look pretty" "No, YOU look pretty" "No seriously, YOU look pretty!!" thing
• People mispronouncing words, such as "confinscate" when they mean "confiscate"

I may post more later as I think of them.

This Is Your Car On Drugs

Last night, I drove back to my dorm after I left the computer lab and when I pulled in to the parking lot, there was a random truck sitting there with these firefighter-type lights flashing. At first I'm thinking some redneck had to go inside the building and was too lazy to park first so he just turned on his flashing lights and stopped in the middle of the parking lot. Then as I pulled in further, I saw several police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck all in the back part of the lot on the gravel. My roommate is diabetic, and when his parents came to visit they gave me this long list of things to do in case his blood sugar goes too high or too low, so I thought maybe something had happened with him. I quickly parked my car and started running up to the main part of where everything was happening...partly because I cared about what happened, partly because I figured that Jack Bauer would run up to the scene like that too. I kinda wish I'd been wearing body armor and carrying a gun. But anyway, I went inside and asked around and found out that some dude's car caught on fire! And I didn't get all the details, but somehow there was a person in the back seat of the car when the police came and they had to pull this guy out as the car was burning. Now if I had to give my personal opinion on this matter, I'd have to go with the idea that somebody was doing something they shouldn't have been doing and that's when the car caught on fire. Unless you believe in spontaneous combustion. Sometimes you have some alcohol...and then you light a cigarette...and then a spark hits the alcohol and you drop it on your car... So anyway, major fun stuff going on here at GWU. (And yes, these are real pictures of the burnt-up car.)

It Always Happens To Me...

In our society today, looks matter. If an "ugly" person and a "pretty" person are both broken down on the side of the road, people will always be more likely to stop for the pretty person. Since I'm a pretty person, I think that is a good rule to go by. Just kidding. Anyway, this story is about a pretty person. A few weeks ago, I was through with classes for the day and I had been sitting in a computer lab on the third floor of the religious studies building. I was walking down the stairs headed to lunch when I saw this woman coming from the nursing department. She had one of those plastic totes (like you see here, except WAY less sturdy) and she looked like she was going to try to roll it down the stairs. She just so happened to be very very attractive. Now I'd like to think that I would help anyone in this situation, but since she was so pretty, and since I am such a he-man, I quickly asked if she needed any help getting it down the stairs. She was nice and said yes, so I'm thinking "Way to go, you're the man." And then, as usual, it went downhill from there. I thought at first that I could just lift the entire tote and carry it down the stairs for her. No flippin' way. This entire tote was filled with textbooks. HEAVY textbooks. Heavy as in THERE IS NO WAY I can lift this thing. Slightly embarassing, yes. Then I decided the best way to do this was for her to hold the luggage handle and for me to lift my end of the tote with a handle on the front. That worked okay, but my hand was getting killed trying to lift up on this handle. And by this time, classes are over and people are rushing down the stairs past us. So at this point, I'm thinking "Maybe when she looks away I can just run and she won't know where I went." Well as we were about 8 steps from the bottom, a professor walked by and said "You know there's an elevator, right?" I've been a student here for two years now, and I've always known about the elevator, but in my excitement to help attractive lady, I completely forgot. And as he's saying this, and I'm lifting the storage tote, the flimsy handle snaps and breaks and pinches my hand pretty hard. But I blocked out the pain so I could complete my mission and get this woman's books to the bottom. So FINALLY we made it down, and we parted ways, and I realized that a couple fingers were bleeding from where the handle snapped. This is my life.

Photographs

So I'm looking through facebook glancing at people's photos and I keep coming across these pictures of couples kissing. And it's not like they're in a large group and someone happened to snap the shot while they were mid-kiss. It looks like these people are alone in their car or at the mall or something and they randomly asked someone to take their picture while they kissed. And you'd think it would be hormone-filled high school kids doing this, but it's college people! Don't get me wrong, I love taking pictures and being in pictures. Maybe it's just because I don't have a girlfriend, but I've never had the urge to have my picture taken while I kissed someone. I don't think I'd look at it later and think about how cute it is...I'd probably be critiquing myself wondering why my lip looks weird or something. And how awkward would it be to be the person taking the picture? "Excuse me sir, will you take our picture while we sit here and kiss?" I imagine them taking the picture, then the couple just keeps kissing, so the person slowly puts the camera down and nervously walks away. So everyone, stop making people take your picture while you kiss. It's just weird.

The Bathroom Stall Story

For my first ever blog post, I think I'll tell a story. This happened about five years ago when I was on a trip with my youth group. We had been on a youth trip to Myrtle Beach, SC and we were headed home. After a few hours of driving, we stopped at a McDonald's so everyone could relieve themselves and have a stretch break. When the guys get in the bathroom, we realize that there are already some people in there, and that we have probably 10-15 guys and there is one urinal and two or three stalls, so we know it could take a while. Just as a reflex, I bent down and looked under the stalls to make sure that all of the stalls were full. In one of the stalls, however, there were no feet. Thinking it was empty, I walked over and tried to push open the door, but it was locked. At this point, I'm mad that some stupid kid thought it would be funny to lock the door and then climb over the stall so that nobody could use it. So I did the logical thing: I grabbed the top of the stall door, pulled myself up to where I could reach over and unlock the door, and there sat this old man reading a newspaper. I quickly jumped down and hid behind the bathroom door, laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. My youth pastor said he heard the guy exclaim "What are you trying to do, break in on me?!" And of course, this whole time, all the guys in the youth group are watching and laughing their heads off. "But," you may ask, "where were the guy's legs??" That's a very good question. One theory, and my personal favorite, is that since he was obviously doing a number two, he was straining and had his feet up against the door. This story is still told late at night on youth trips at my church. Good times.