Upcoming Blog Posts

Wow it's been a pretty long time since I've posted anything here. So to make up for that, over the next couple weeks I'll be writing several blogs from my summer experiences working at a church in northern Virginia. At the beginning of the summer I purchased a voice recorder, kinda like those old mini-cassette recorders, except smaller and way better. I tried to carry it with me as much as possible, especially while driving, so that when I'd have a random amazing thought I could capture it instead of letting it float off, like I've done too many times in the past. It actually worked out pretty well, and hopefully you can appreciate some of the fruits of my labor (if you call talking to yourself in the car "labor"). Some of the posts may relate to church work, some of them may relate to getting terrible service in a restaurant, some will just be rants...you get the idea. Hopefully the first few posts will be up today or tomorrow.

The Really Real World

The past few weeks I've been watching the 20th season of the Real World on MTV. I've never really watched it that much in the past, but there's something about this season's cast that intrigues me. Two weeks ago I was watching and I saw one of the most intense and heartbreaking moments I've ever seen on tv. Joey is one of the roommates on the show, and he's this big guy, really good looking, has a bit of a temper, works out several hours a day, etc. He never really had much of a family growing up, so in his searching for attention he got involved with the wrong people and ended up doing drugs and becoming an alcoholic. A few months before the show started filming Joey had had enough. He severed ties with those friends who were bad influences and basically broke away from the whole party lifestyle because he was tired of living that way. He was in search of something more. He was sober up until the show began, but moving to Hollywood and being in a house with 6 roommates proved to be too much for him and he began slip back into his old lifestyle. So I was watching this episode and Joey had been drinking all night and he seemed to turn into a completely different person. He got angry and started threatening the other people in the house. He talked about how he didn't want to be on the show anymore, and at one point stated that he didn't even want to be alive anymore. It continued to get worse and worse, and the other roommates, especially the girls, are actually scared that he might physically harm them. The next day the roommates tried to talk to him about getting help for his alcoholism; he didn't take this well and responded by calling the producers and telling them he wanted to go home. The producers arrived at the house a little while later and took him off to the side to try to convince him to stay, and this is when a beautiful thing happened. The producers ask Joey if he wants to work through this and stay on the show and he says, "I don't care anymore, I really don't." One of the producers responds by saying "I do think you care, and we care about you." Joey says, "No, no one cares about me." They decide to give Joey a choice to go to rehab for 30 days and then return to the show. At this point Joey starts openly weeping and says "You'd do that for me?" I literally got chills when he said that. Imagine living your whole life where you have a crappy family, friends who are bad influences, and nobody who seems to care if you live or die, and suddenly someone says "Hey we're gonna take care of you, because we care about you and want the best for you." If that's not a picture of God's love for His children then I don't know what is. I've seen reactions like that many times in the past when dealing with youth. All they need is for someone to tell them that they are loved. When you see how Joey was acting while he was drunk it would be easy to write him off as a loser and not want to have anything to do with him. The producers looked past that...yeah he's being a jerk right now and yeah he's causing all sorts of problems, but he needs to know that we're here for him no matter what. And the sad part is I'm pretty sure that these two guys aren't even saved, yet they still recognized that Joey needed saving. As Christians we are called to go beyond our first impressions and superficial thoughts and tell people that someone loved them enough to give their life for them. It's tough sometimes. People have messy lives and we don't want to get involved or intervene. Thank God someone intervened for me.