Welp, folks, it's official. I am the next campus minister for the Cats for Christ campus ministry at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas.

Yay!

I learned today that Max Bennett retired as campus minister of the University of Oklahoma Baptist Student Union, a role he carried for 37 years. I never knew this man, but I feel I owe a tribute to his work because I know that his spiritual leadership profoundly affected many students, and many of those students profoundly affected me during my years at OU. My work and involvement was concentrated with the Sooners for Christ ministry, but I had a deep appreciation of and learned a tremendous amount from the mission of the Baptist Student Union. Their powerful work for Christ at OU has been felt all around the world. It was from them that I learned what true discipleship was really about, and what an outward-focused ministry looks like and how that reflects itself in the moment by moment faith of the believer. So, Max Bennett, I salute you and honor you for the fruit of your life and work that has been seen in my own life, a guy who never knew you.

Right now weather.com says the winds in Abilene are 43 mph. This seems slow, given that it literally feels like a hurricane outside. A hurricane of dust and debris. Literally everything is either blown over or covered with dust, or both, including the big dumpster behind my house. We tried to have a cookout for our Mexico team today, but had to end up packing up and taking it inside because we could not keep anything down, plus you could hardly hold your eyes open without them getting coated with dirt. One of our girls damaged someone else's car when her door blew open out of her hands. A couple of our cakes blew away.

Welcome to Abilene Dust Bowl 2007! I can hear the local car wash owners licking their chops right now.

We are a society of voyeurs. This has been painfully obvious for a long time, but it has become particularly poignant lately considering what is occupying a great deal of our serious media news coverage. We are insanely intrigued by big time people with problems - the most recent news trifecta started with the astronaut who drove 900 miles in diapers, continued into the Anna Nicole Smith news orgy, and now has everything to do with Britney Spears cutting her hair. You know as well as I do - these have not been human interest side stories, these are the front page headlines, day after day. I read CNN.com first thing every day, but I am finding that even the most respected leader in news is transforming from a national and worldwide news delivery vehicle into a celebrity gossip rag.

Understandably, some of the media figures that feed into this frenzy are the late night talk show hosts. They work to find the humor in these situations, but also help keep the stories alive and front and center.

Enter Craig Ferguson (one of the major late night figures). I am not a regular viewer of Ferguson's show, but I have been intrigued this morning by the way he has somewhat shocked the media world by putting his foot down, and putting it down hard. Last night on his show he made it very clear, in a long monologue, why he would no longer participate in jokes about Britney Spears.

If you have 12 minutes, please click here to watch. He talks honestly about his own downward spiral and the day he contemplated suicide.

Later he did an interview on CBS about his comments, which I also watched. In that interview, he made the following statements:

"I think there is an edit button missing somewhere. I think we should look it up every now and again. Isn't there any restraint at some point?"

"I can edit myself. I can say that 'I don't have to do that.'"

"This wasn't for Britney Spears. This was for me. I did it because it was an act of conscience."

"I'm amazed that not poking fun of someone has become a news story."

If you watch his monologue all the way through, you'll see why he really means these statements.

I hope that Ferguson ends up not being the only voice in this. So far he has been the only one to step to the podium with a kind of clarity and call to consciousness that comes from a heartfelt desire to simply see the world doing the right thing. His being at that point of desperation in his life has taught him, and hopefully now the world, that this kind of oppressive, obsessive voyeurism does nothing for anyone. What I'm not sure that society realizes is that participating in these frenzies is not a matter of a distant audience watching someone spiral downwards. What we are doing is following right behind Anna Nicole into death.

There is a part two to this that I may write about in a blog post to come.

How wise would it be to turn something down you are guaranteed and would be satisfied with to pursue something that may not happen, but would fulfill the very essence of your dreams if it did?

GAAAAAHHH!!!!!

"I just ruined my entire life over something I knew was wrong."

This phrase was muttered by a man on a clip I pulled up from the "To Catch a Predator" series done by Dateline NBC, where adult men are caught attempting to rendezvous with young teenage girls for sex. It seems extreme... something that hard core sexual deviants would do. To go to the lengths it takes to establish contact, initiate enough to get the interest established, set up the encounter, travel to the location, participate in the act, and then leave your subject behind while you leave and go about your life seems like something only the most obscure and desperate would attempt. But those of us who would think that are naive. This weekend a campus minister I know from Oklahoma was busted doing this very thing. A very well respected campus minister who leads a very well respected ministry. He was caught in a police sting and now this area of his life has been publicly exposed and he will forever be marked by the authorities as a sexual offender. His ministry life and career are destroyed. His family, including children, are forever scarred.

"...something I knew was wrong..."

This is probably the sentiment of that campus minister. How many outs did he have during the whole process of seeking out the contact and traveling across the state to do the deed? 100? 1,000? 1,000,000? I can only imagine a desperate God, showing him a way at every moment to shut the whole thing down and turn back. Something he knew was wrong. I wonder how many "To Catch a Predator" clips he had seen himself?

But we cannot discuss this incident without taking a hard look at ourselves. It would be very easy to pin on a huge pride button and bask in the self-righteous comfort of knowing that we would never do such a heinous and unthinkable thing. But is that the point? Sin is sin. How often do we go through with things that we know are disgusting and gut-wrenching to God, and are provided with countless numbers of outs in the process? How often are the massive red flags of conscious waving warnings about the danger, yet we press on? I'm afraid that there are times when I simply make those flags a part of the landscape, which usually makes sinfulness entertaining if not enjoyable. But is that not exactly the kind of thing that would lead a minister to jeopardize everything he is and God has made him to be for a few moments with a 13 year old?

----------------

Update:

This campus minister, in an online chat leading up to the encounter, stated “I could get in trouble, you’re 13 and I’m older, we aren’t supposed to be doing this.”

I'm praying that we learn important lessons from this. I'm also praying for that ministry, which has obviously been terribly violated by this.

If there is one constant in life, one thing that is never-changing, completely consistent, no matter what... it is this: every day we live, every moment we experience, we are that much closer to seeing God.

Awesome.

Today's weather forecast for Abilene on weather.com stated "Abundant sunshine." That cracks me up for some reason.