An Open Letter To The Church

The following is an open letter to the Church in general and those who call themselves Christians, not one specific body, congregation, person, or pastor. While the following statements and critiques may not be true for everyone, I’ve seen (or heard) them hold true for enough people that I feel it necessary to address. There are times I fall into some of these categories. read more

My Burden and Issue With the Church (vlog)

Why I’ll Be At #WorldFit Day!

Whether we like it or not (and most of us don’t), fitness is a crucial part of our lives. It ensures that we remain healthy, properly functioning, and most importantly, alive. Don’t let the skinny frame fool you — I’m not a fitness buff. I was at one point a few years ago, though. I would be in the gym five days out of the week, cardio for at least an hour and perhaps some weights. read more

The Dangers of Shortsightedness

Recently, I had a friend tell me a sad, but probably all too common story. One of his friends had a daughter who was 14 years old. Although things seemed to be going well in the daughter’s life from the outside, she must’ve been a different person on the inside. Late one afternoon her younger, six year old brother walked into their shared bathroom to find that his sister had hung herself. Obviously shocked and scared, the boy let out a blood curdling scream, causing their mother to come rushing. Their mother ran into the room, snatched her down and upon detecting a faint pulse, began emergency procedures and what able to resuscitate her. While the girl survived her suicide attempt, because of the lack of blood flowing to her brain for an extended length of time, she has severe brain damage. read more

What Happens When God Doesn’t Heal?

Riding the train to school this week, I found myself reading the blog of one of my favorite people: Rae Lewis-Thorton. (If you’re not familiar with her, check out her blog and follow her on Twitter.) HIV positive for over 22 years, Rae is an Emmy Award winning AIDS activist, as well as a minister who uses her story to encourage others. On this particular day, she wrote an incredible post about Christians would approach her and give her a variety of reasons why she’s not healed, and remedies to become healed. Clearly, God is more than able to heal someone of HIV/AIDS, (He’s done it for my friend Danny Wallace. I know Danny is not the sole case of a person being healed from HIV/AIDS, but he’s the one that I know personally.) but sometimes, perhaps, it’s not in His plan. read more

The Day I Got Ahead Of Myself

I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I think I have the best way of doing things. I think I know best, and you can’t tell me otherwise. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong, and sometimes I’m wrong and it bites me in the butt.

Last Friday, I was helping move some tents for aHomeInHaiti.org, from the Courageous Church offices up to the warehouse where they would be shipped to Haiti from. I arrived at Courageous at nine in the morning and within two hours we had loaded a 26 foot U-Haul truck with over six palettes of new tents. read more

Is Selfishness Killing Our Relationships?

Over the weekend I was privy to an interesting conversation among some people whose opinions were, to say the least, different from mine. Any time I can hear another perspective or point of view, I take it. You never know what you might learn.

In this instance, the conversation, as it often tends to do when you have more than two single people in the same place, moved to relationships and sex. Different people spoke their pieces and some disagreed with others — the usual. What stuck out was one gentleman’s perspective when it came to sex and pleasing his partner. read more

Twitter Church — April 10

The other night, after having a great brunch with a friend, and doing some homework, I got a little overwhelmed with life, even to the point of becoming a tad depressed. Then I talked to my dad. Both of them. My dad called me on the phone and we had a wonderful conversation just about all that’s going on in both our lives. It was nice to know that we were struggling with some of the same things. We were open, honest, and vulnerable about our lives. And it felt great.

Then we prayed and talked to our Heavenly Father. It was just what we both needed. I don’t know about him, but I was crying so hard by the time we finished — I mean that ugly cry too — that I couldn’t even breathe out of my nose. But I felt so much better. Like a weight had been lifted off my shoulder. There was little doubt in my mind that my Twitter family needed to hear what I had just received. Below is what I shared. (If you’d like the high-res photo, click here)

And because this is Twitter, you’ll have to read from the bottom up, unless someone would like to take the time to reverse all the tweets.

Modern Day School Segregation: Is Race To Blame?

In America, race and class are inextricably linked. Whether by chance, or more likely, by purpose, that is the reality that we must live with. Most of the children who attend New York’s Lower Laboratory School for Gifted Education and Straus School, and their parents, know this all too well. read more

Are You Married To The Process

A few days out of the week I volunteer at an elementary school in Southwest Atlanta. It’s different from the area where I grew up and went to school in almost every way I could imagine — student demographic, parental involvement, median family income, housing situations, etc. Needless to say, over the past few months I’ve learned quite a lot from the kids and the teachers. In fact, probably more than they’ve learned from me.

Yesterday, I had a chance to work with a fifth grader; we’ll call him Bobby. He is struggling in a lot of areas — reading comprehension and math primarily — and is definitely not on par with his grade level, and is nowhere near ready to enter middle school in the fall.

That morning, our focus was math. Me and math have never been the best of friends. I understood it and had little problem doing it, but it was by far my least favorite subject. So, when the teacher said multiplication and simplifying fractions, I couldn’t help but groan a little on the inside. But, I didn’t let it show.

Let me pause right here to say this: while I consider myself to be a teacher, and in fact enjoy teaching new things to new people, I have zero experience with elementary school kids. Part of the reason I began volunteering was to gain experience in that area. I’m used to working with adults. They’re easier for me to deal with because I more readily understand their perspectives and mindset. Not so much with kids. So, going into this I wasn’t sure what in the world I was going to do.

We went into a room where we could have some peace and quiet and I found some flashcards to work with. After a few minutes of seeing him struggle with the most basic equations, I could see this approach wasn’t working; we needed to shift gears and try a new approach.

Glancing around the room, I spotted some colored blocks that could be linked together. I remembered a conversation I had just the other day with a friend who used to teach Kindergarten. She told me that she found it more effective if the kids had something to touch and hold on to as she taught the lesson (e.g., if they’re talking about adding, giving them blocks to add). I thought the same thing could work here.

We began working with the cubes and grouping them into rows and columns and I explained how multiplication was really just grouping sets of numbers together. The concept seemed to land a little better in his mind. As we worked through a few problems, and I corrected a few errors, he appeared to be grasping the idea clearly. On the inside, I patted myself on the back for taking a different approach that seemed to have gained a better result — one that Bobby would hopefully use in the future.

As I was walking back to the train station, a thought popped into my head: It’s easy to get stuck in tradition. Sometimes we get so stuck in doing things the way they’ve always been done that we miss the opportunity to think outside the box. We often overlook the opportunity to be innovative and use our creativity to find a new, betters ways that we hadn’t previously tried.

It’s easy to get married to the process, but often in life, the results are worth more than the process. Don’t get me wrong, there are certain tried and true methods that work time and time again, and, are in fact necessary for our development. But don’t be afraid to think about other ways to get where you need to be. If you notice that one road is stagnant, try something else. You might be surprised at the progress you’ll see when you simply change your approach.

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