This morning in my class the professor made a passing comment about scholarship being the exercise of overstating things.

Immediate me and three others sitting around the table, in unison, said "true that."

I don't think he understood us.

I grew up around a Dad who was an advertising man so he was always pointing out interesting copy writing on products and advertisements. The other day I bought a desktop computer that has a snazzy graphics card. The guy I bought it from gave me the original box in which the card came. The card happens to be in the "Verto" series manufactured by this particular company, and on the back of the box it has a section labeled "The Journey of Verto." Here it is, in all its copy-writing glory. I swear I am not making this up:

Like a phoenix out of the ashes, my journey began. From heat and flame, fire permeated my being, beginning my evolution and awakening the forces within me. I am not human, I am not machine, I am unknown. Cathartic water has purified me, regenerating who I am. The aqueous fluid alters my skin, mutating its very nature. My beating heart propels me towards the future and away from my dark past. I am power. I am speed. I am imagination. I am transformaton. My world will become your reality. Come on the journey with me, let me drench your senses and immerse you in my visual universe. There's no going back.

Who is the guy sitting in a cubicle getting paid to write this stuff? And how do I apply?

At the end of the day I've got to say that I live a pretty good life. What else could it be when you spend the entire day being attacked from all sides with "Happy Birthdays," eating breakfast with a load of friends who have declared that time a "Cary-OKee" party, doing the traditional Musical Friday festivities with people who actually went out of their way to come to Rosa's because of my birthday, shooting golf balls all around campus with a bunch of trend-setters who are taking ACU by storm with Ultimate Putt Putt (an event that was arranged entirely on Facebook in honor of my birthday), sitting around Sharkie's with cool people, and winding up the night with good friends and a movie. My phone rang off the hook too, and I spent most of the movie going down the list trying to call everyone back. Today saw little things too like praying next to the GATA fountain with a friend and passing another freshman student who needed to talk about some things.

I know that there are people in the world that feel like they don't have anyone. I've felt the pangs of that kind of pain in my own life. Because of that, I hope that I never take this kind of community for granted, because it truly is a gift. It really doesn't take a lot to let someone know that you really care about them. There are ways in my life in which I know I need to improve upon that discipline, and it is showed by the ways people care about me. I can't even sit down at a computer in the Learning Commons for two minutes without being attacked from behind by multiple choruses of Happy Birthday. Little stuff like that makes life a happy place. A couple of years ago my friend and coworker, Kristy, went through her phone telling everyone about my birthday, and I arrived to my office that morning to find a giant pile of gifts and cards stacked against the door. I still have a giant birthday card signed by all the Sooners for Christ that was presented to me at retreat one year (my birthday always seemed to fall during or around fall retreat). I also still have a handmade card assembled by the Freshman Cult girls. Of course, it depicts a cow with a bell and an OU visor.

So, a big thank you to everyone who has helped make this day great all the years of my life. You're amazing.

Right now my second experience with a Christian school lectureship is going on. While I am not a total stranger to these things and other conference atmospheres, I am always a little amazed (whether it is a lectureship, NCMS, Tulsa Workshop, etc) at the way people are able to get away from their own atmospheres and talk freely and openly about all the right answers for their particular situation, whether it be local ministry, inner city work, church planting, campus ministry, missions... you name it. I get sucked into this a lot. The truth is, I am a little tired of people coming together and throwing out all these grand visions and austere, theological and "missional" answers to these big things where others or the "church" at large is the enemy. But, that being said, I still fully participate in all the yakkity yak yak. I guess it's an addiction.

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I attended the lectureship meeting for campus ministers tonight (where, oddly enough, there were hardly any campus ministers because lectureship has now been moved to the start of the school year). Of course, this was another yak session about campus ministry where people throw out a lot of good-sounding stuff (me included) but you come away wondering what, if anything, just took place that was actually helpful. I suppose it was for some. I sure hope I never come off as someone who just loves to hear himself talk, because it sure is annoying when others come off that way. Interrupting Cow was our moderator tonight. It was good to meet some others who work in campus ministry that I hadn't met before, though. Good networking with people who have a multitude of experience is great great opportunity.

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One theological buzzword that has been floating around for a while is the idea of being "missional." I love this concept because it has provoked as innovative a lot of things that Christians should have been doing and thinking ever since the beginning. It carries with it the idea that the work of the kingdom is something that everyone carries in every context. Therefore, it is very concerned with awareness of culture, opportunity, etc. It is concerned with where people are right now and how God can come into that context, not to where you want to get them.

I say this because a grad student friend of mine used to attend Freed-Hardeman University and told me of some efforts that had been underway by some faculty and students there to create campus ministries at some state schools. Of course I fully support this idea, but it immediately raised flags in my mind because I couldn't help but wonder what was feeding the motivation. Let's face it, Freed-Hardeman University is not like any state school on earth. If we are talking missionality here, then what is the plan for students who have chosen to do their entire education at an extremely small, very conservative college in small town Tennessee to relate to the lives of students at a massive, free-flowing, to-each-his-own, liberal state school? I say, if God has planted the bug in you and others to take Jesus to a place like that, then go be students there. Don't go as a single-minded team of evangelizers. You will soon be a broken collection of ex-state school "missionaries."


That is all my yakkity yak yak for tonight.

It's a strange thing to have a significant part of several years of your life cast in an entirely new light. As some of you have figured out, a good friend of mine with whom I have been very close for a number of years has been exposed as faking a good portion of her life. She reads this blog, and I hope she reads this, because since she has been found out she won't talk to me at all. Maybe this is my best hope at communicating with her.

This person came into my life as the new friend of a good friend. She showed up at our campus ministry student center at OU one night, I believe it was during the 2000-2001 school year. She was a resident on the floor where my friend was an RA. She came from a horrific background - her family was abusive and distant, she was the product of divorces and disinterest. She loved the party scene at OU and constantly checked out of life in a number of self-abusive ways. She had been part of several girls on that floor who loved to hate my RA friend - until one day when she was walking down the hall and my friend was trying to put up a large sheet of paper on a bulletin board. She stopped to help and soon discovered that this RA wasn't so bad after all and my friend invited her into her dorm room to hang out. She did, and it was the beginning of a relationship that would ultimately see this freshman student becoming a Christian and embarking on a remarkable turnaround path in her life. Up until a few months ago she still told the story of praying for the first time inside this RA's room and how nervous she was and how she had no idea how to pray. And just a few months ago she returned from leading her fifth six week mission team abroad to teach the Gospel to a hungry world. She devoured the Bible and C.S. Lewis. She became an active part of the campus ministry. Despite baggage that still plagued her from her former life, the transformation that God was leading her through was tremendous. I soon became fast friends with her and she and I would ultimately become one of the closest friends that each of us has had.

Despite her turnaround and the path of faith that she embarked upon, tragedy and misfortune would continue to strike at her. Her mother would succomb to a ravaging cancer and die at a young age. Not long after, her brother would be found in a remote barn far west of Oklahoma City, stabbed several times in an apparent suicide (which she thought was foul play). Her father would savagely beat her with a fire poker, breaking two of her ribs which would ultimately punture and destroy part of her lungs and send her to Ohio for emergency surgery. Her stomach would be plagued by ulcers for almost two years, but would actually turn about to be an advanced stage of stomach cancer, almost surely terminal. Through all of these events and stages in life, innumerable people would come to her aid, almost all from the community of faith that surrounded her. She was taken in, housed, given untold amounts of aid, surrounded by friends, supported, cared for, and loved. In a series of events that we all chalked up to the provision of God, a random wealthy woman in Oklahoma City came forward and began to cover all of her bills and living expenses.

But something began unraveling a couple of months ago when she came back from her latest mission adventure to Peru and proceeded to endorse the breakup of the marriage of a girl on the team so she and her could come together as lesbian lovers. In a phone call to me, she renounced any belief she had in Christianity with the full expectation of the endorsement of the community around her. This was a major disappointment to me but I determined to still show her the love and support that she needed as a person and as a friend. It actually seemed to surprise her that her view of Christ and lifestyle choices had no bearing on my desire to maintain a friendship with her.

But then the big one hit. After the investigative efforts of a couple of people close to her that had become suspicious, it was revealed that everything that she had ever led anyone to believe about her was false. Her mom is alive and well, as is her brother. There is no cancer. Her surgery was fake. Everything that she had ever led anyone to believe was a lie. She is not who she says she is.

In the matter of a moment, the entire existence of one of my best friends became an illusion.

For many reasons, this makes me feel like an idiot. All of the sneaking questions I had about some things, but never took seriously, have turned out to be true. It's a strange feeling when all of your images are shattered but it somehow makes sense at the same time. It conveniently worked out that no one could go to either the funeral of her mom or her brother. She would never tell anyone who her cancer doctors were and never would let anyone come to her chemo or radiation treatments. She never showed the real signs of cancer, but I wrote a lot of that off. She never told anyone about her excursion to Ohio for surgery until after the fact. This made me angry because I could have gone with her to help her. She never showed any scars from the surgery. She never wanted to talk about her mom or her death much. She never let anyone meet her immediate family, except for one time when her younger brother came to Norman. It didn't make sense to me that they gave her no support. I chalked it up to them not caring about her, which I know is a reality in the world. But it really didn't make sense to me that her grandparents, who I had met and who loved her very much, gave her no support. It is probably because she never let them in on the con she was running, and for good reason.

A few years ago there was a TV show on SpikeTV called the Joe Schmoe Show. This was a parody of reality TV shows set up so that all of the people in the show were actors playing a character except for one guy. To him, the show was the real deal and all of these people were trying to win just like him. They did the most ridiculous and outrageous things, but this guy was so honest, sincere, and trusting that he simply went along with it and shrugged off all of the crazy stuff that was happening. He genuinely cared about all of these people, which drove the producers into such guilt at one point that they considered cancelling the whole operation. But ultimately the weirdest thing they did was put in a character who was "the pal." This guy was to become best friends with the guy and be his confidant during the show, which he pulled off masterfully. During the last episode they revealed that the whole thing had been set up, which really drove the guy crazy. But a heart-wrenching scene happened when he turned to the guy who was his friend and ask him, sincerely, "are you an actor too?" The actor had to say yes, which sent the real guy to his knees in tears because everything he had shared with this person as a friend had been completely fake.

Thankfully, I know that my world is not fake. I have just happened to encounter and befriend a masterful actor.

Please pray for her heart. I know that God can still do amazing, and real, things with her if she ever wants it.

Trust is a very expensive thing to give. To give trust so deeply and intimately that your very heart is laid bare, to serve someone sacrificially and give of yourself in time, patience, love, discipleship, and intimacy, is to do something that is a divine call from God himself. I hope that no one who reads this ever learns what it is like to do that, for years on end, and then discover that everything that the other person ever said, did, and shared with you is a COMPLETELY FABRICATED LIE.

Total betrayal is a pain without words.



At least we know that God is forever faithful. And these kind of people are the exception in life.

So CBS News is doing a feature piece tonight on the flap over Facebook. Dang this thing is big.

This summer I taught a class at the National Campus Ministries Seminar about the social networking phenomenon and what campus ministers need to know to be connected and to their students and minister effectively using these tools. Most of my time was spent on the subjects of MySpace and Facebook. I have developed a non-scientific social theory through my observations of these communities that I call Communal Communication. MySpace and particularly Facebook have been two of the dominant drivers of a type of communication that is both personal and communal at the same time. Communication takes place between two people that is recorded in the public sphere for all to see and access, and millions of young people participate in this communication method every day.

Despite the widespread acceptance of communal communication, the developers of Facebook seem to have found its boundaries. Yesterday Facebook introduced its News Feed and Mini-Feed features, which create a running list of everything you and all the people in your extended network have been doing with Facebook. It chronicles every connection made, every post that is made between any two friends, every change of status or relationship, every tag that is created, every group joined and every photo posted by every person with whom you are connected, among other things. It even supposedly lists posts that have been deleted by a user (though I haven't personally seen this yet). Amazingly I hadn't logged on to Facebook in the last two days but was caught by the rush of outrage among my peers earlier today concerning these developments, which came about yesterday. They are not alone - it seems that the Facebook community at large (closing in on ten million users) has stopped just short of violent demonstrations regarding this issue. As of an hour ago, the largest Facebook Feed protest group has amassed over 500,000 members and is growing exponentially. Mark Zuckerberg himself (the Facebook founder) has responded to the immense reaction with cries of calm. I don't doubt that we will be seeing significant changes to these features if not total removal. If only he could see the microcosm of 11 college students sitting at Wendy's and passionately airing their disgust at their beloved Facebook.

This has caused me to refine my ideas about Communal Communication. My working theory now is that this phenomenon has its acceptance only when information about ones activities and communication is sought or discovered, not when it is packaged and delivered unrequested (with timestamps) to others. Communal Communication has its limits at innocuous or incidental information being packaged as news events and broadcast to others. Hopefully the Facebook developers are learning these lessons.

Today I have witnessed my two computers die or almost die. My mighty 17" laptop is looking pretty humble right now hooked up to an external monitor because it's former widescreen glory will no longer show a picture. I have an old Sony desktop as a backup, but in my jerry-rigging attempts to transfer my laptop hard drive to the desktop drive, I have managed to blow the power supply on the desktop. My laptop must be sent off soon for service (while the extended warranty is still in effect), but this leaves me computerless. I try to deny it to myself but a large portion of my life is spent on these things. The longest I have been abstinent of my own computer (while not abroad) is about three weeks when I accidently left my power cord in Memphis.

So, I may disappear from AIM, the blog, Facebook, MySpace, email, Bloglines, and all the other wonders of my cyber life while the warranty people are hopefully looking at my dead laptop and saying to each other "He obviously needs a state-of-the-art brand-new replacement."

I can't imagine taking notes by hand. The horror!

As I was dozing in an out this afternoon reading a socio-rhetorical commentary of the epistle to the Hebrews, one of my old roommates called with the news of a new baby on the way for he and his wife. This now marks the fourth marriage and third child to be produced by the original Club Belknap boys (who I consider to be Derek, Sean, Garrett, Ryan, and me). So far Garrett and Ryan have managed to avoid off-springing to this point. And I have managed to avoid both marrying and off-springing (the only one to accomplish both feats). Although the five of us don't really keep in regular contact, it has been interesting to follow the life progression of each one of us. The original Club Belknap was formed in the summer of 2000 in Norman by Sean and Garrett, with Derek (the one who called) and I signing on only weeks after and taking over the master bedroom. Derek and I would share a single bedroom for 3 and a half years and enjoy every minute of it (even when firecrackers would come rolling under the door into the bathroom). Derek and I would eventually oversee two generations of Club Belknap, as Sean and Garrett would move on and be replaced by Ryan and eventually Bob. Ryan has now been replaced by Steven, and Derek and I by Daniel. I think Caleb now lives there too. The original duplex on Belknap Street also got replaced by the double-sized apartment on Dewey Ave, and Derek and I were actually the last ones to hang on to the Club Belknap name. But the spirit still stands, as Bob has constructed in the apatment an homage to who he considers to be the "founding fathers" - Derek, Ryan, and me. Derek and I consider the historical record to go back a little farter but hey, what the heck. A gigantic American flag made of over 1200 Dr. Pepper cans also adorns an entire wall of the living room as does newly-installed stadium seating and a 5000-inch big screen TV. Things were a little more modest in Derek and I's day. We just had Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce and the live version of COPS outside our window to keep us entertained.

But I digress. Sean was already engaged when we moved in with him, so that was a done deal. Derek was essentially a married man second semester of our Freshman year when he and Brooke stopped hating each other and started holding hands. Since then I have been his groomsman and now she's pregnant. Sophomore year the dynamic duo of Lori and Meghan made their appearance in the Outreach Center, which created a fun little game of romantic ping pong between them and the Hollingsworth brothers until it all settled out with Meghan married to Garrett and Lori married to Cameron. (That's an interesting story of two best friends since they were babies actually ending up with the same last names). Garrett and Meghan now live in Abilene, but I don't see them much. Then we took and trip to Mexico in the spring of 2002 with the campus ministry from Midwestern State University and there was a pretty wavy-haired girl named Sherry that Ryan couldn't get away from. After 10,000 hours of phone calls and once-a-day letters while he and I were in Ukraine that summer, they decided they would like to do this forever and now they are hitched and he is campus minister at MSU in Wichita Falls. Speaking of Ukraine, that's where I first realized just how beautiful this energetic blonde-haired girl named Jessica was, and I was lucky enough for her, who had never considered dating anyone, to like me back. It was a wonderful time of life, but after after almost four years of trying, it ultimately wouldn't work out. So, I actually almost would have joined the ranks of the hitched, but God has had other plans in mind.

The days of Club Belknap were really just a frame for an entire period of life that was an amazing adventure that I wouldn't trade for anything else. But the adventures didn't stop there and they are long from over. I hope they never stop, and, indeed, I figure it is only up to me to stop them. So, Derek, thanks for calling and I wish you and Brooke the best (Brooke pregnant - Lord help you, brother). For anyone reading this, whether you are in college or not, make the best of your days right now so that you can look back on them with awe.