Life a Weblog for Young Adults

I chewed. Plain and simple. Using smokeless tobacco was a popular pastime in my rural hometown, even though I had been well warned of its dangers. As I worked on the farm during the summer, tobacco was a diversion from my task in the fields—and I embraced it. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t quit.

Food—I’m a big fan of it. It gives me energy; it makes me feel satisfied; it helped me grow when I was little. But my favorite thing about food is the taste, the experience of eating something delicious. Food is both essential and enjoyable. Jesus knew we would be able to relate to a basic need such as food, so He talked a lot about it—spiritual food, that is. So what does it mean?

While some movies are clearly meant to be nothing more than escapist entertainment enjoyed with a big bucket of popcorn, there’s an ever-increasing number of films that have far more substantial (and spiritually charged) take-away value.

A quick glance through the Gospels reveals that Jesus was a pretty big fan of a good story. While He could’ve easily resorted to blasé, timid preaching to get the message across (He’s the Son of God, after all. Who was going to argue with His methods?), He instinctively resonated with the idea behind that popular Mary Poppins ditty long before it made its way to the big screen: “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

I re-discovered another passage in Luke 22, the story of Jesus’ final meal with His disciples, a meal Jesus used to help close the normal/un-normal gap. This is the seventh recorded meal scene in Luke and two more remain. Evidently, Luke loved meals. So much happened around the dinner table.

Remember back in the day when MacBook Air computers came out? They were so remarkably thin that Newsweek writer Steven Levy even managed to lose his. He thinks it was so thin that either he or his wife (she’s the only one to blame, right?) threw it out with a stack of magazines. Amazing.

In the search for new ideas and ways of doing life and ministry, we seek out insights from a variety of sources. It’s no surprise in today’s social media obsessed culture that there’s a blog for everything. So how do you weed through the clutter and get to thoughtful and compelling ideas?

Listen in as Michael Kelley at 2008’s Collegiate Week West talks about living in the meantime—between when Jesus broke into the world the first time and when He’ll do it again for the final time. So what really are we to be about while we wait?

Swaziland is a small kingdom in southern Africa of just over 900,000 people. Within a month the population dropped from 1.2 million. Yes, you read right. It has the unfortunate distinction of being the most HIV-infected country on the planet. Over 46 percent of the adult population is HIV positive, although clinic workers will tell you that four out of five people in Swaziland test positive for HIV.