TheMissionalPosition.com: Here Are Some Christmas Thoughts Spanky!

Thursday, December 21, 2006

RE:SOUNDING (i am resounding the joy i previously blogged of previously)
Current mood: LONGING FOR WASSLE & FIGGY PUDDING!!!
Category: MySpace

Earlier this morning I composed a blog entitled Repeat the Sounding Joy. Now I wanted to take some time to mention somethings that bring me joy not just during this holiday season but throughout the year.

My beautiful wife and awesome sweetheart Becky! Becky brings me joy.

My awesomely cool firstborn son Aidan Elijah Landry McMinn, Eli daddy loves you! Eli brings me joy.

The creator and sustainer of all things, including my crazy, off-kilter, warrior-wannabe, counter-culture life and lifestyle, YHWH. The LORD brings me great joy everlasting.

YHWH's son, Yeshua, for saving my sorry arse-life out of the muck and mire of an existence bent towards rebellion, creator-hatred, self-destruction, and mind-pollution. Emmanuel, God with us, provided for my joy to be made complete and for me to experience it in the first place.

The great ghost, the spirit of the living God, for putting in me power and boldness and authority replacing the fear and timidity and cowardice towards righteousness, justice and huminity that exists within me, in and of myself when seperated from I AM. Spirit, you make my joy continuous and everpresent.

Did I mention my hot wife and champion-warrior son, they bring joy. in countless ways but one way each is: Becky every Monday when you pan-fry me up some of my favorite chicken dinners and Eli when you look me in the eyes and then get a grin on your face that spreads into a full blown smile. Or when we put you on the changing table and you begin to laugh and smile, and giggle, and gurgle, and even grunt at us. Man that makes my heart feel like it will burst it cannot singularly contain the joy that wells within my heart during those moments.

Music, brings me great joy. I can not count the countless (hence the reason I can not count them) times music has lifted my soul out of the pits of deep or even just lifted it out of the drabness of a hum-drum day. All types of music, the hardcore of Focused or Unashamed or the Blamed that lifts to pump my fists and remember to be angry at the injustice and social-spiritual-political-economic unrest of the world.

The bouncy punk of MxPx or Value Pak or Squad 5-0 that reminds me to stay young and have fun and care about relationships.

Or the emo of Dear Ephesus, The Promise Ring, and Sunny Day Real Estate that reminds me that I can be sensative and share my emotions rather than bottling them up inside so that they might explode in my left ventrical or burst a blood vessel in my grey matter as I sit mid sentence discussing the day over dinner with my family.

What about opera and classical like the Pirates of Penzance or Vivaldi and TChaikovsky that reminds me that God created a masterpiece that is as large as the complex and incalcuable universe and also in the granduer and majesty of a single atom, at which humanity is the pinnacle of that creative endevour and He endowed us with His complex and creative sensibility.

The country of Cash, Straight, Jennings, Nelson, Jones, Lynn, and Yoakum that reminds me to never forget my roots, my home town Cowtown and my home state of Texas, to enjoy the twang in my talk and not hide it, to revel in my rugged ancestors who labored harder so that I could labor easier. That beer, boots, and belt buckles are not evil. To appreciate the feel of dancing on a well worn hardwood floor with a pretty lady. And never ever forget to treat people with respect and treat the ladies right and to feed the dog. New country has lost this heart but real country gives joy even to the discerning music aficionado.

The crooning, bleeting or stammering of jazz masters as varied as Basie, Connick, Gillespie, Blues Eyes, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, and even contemporaries, my favorites Medeski, Martin and Wood. Life is not confined to a formula or box, no simple 3 step plan and 7 stage system can solve every problem or answer every question. Jazz is the complexity and mystery of life put to music and you can't right it down or always predict where its going.

The joy of writing. I can say what I feel and mean what I say and share it with whomever. And tomorrow I can jot down the opposite because that is what the experience of the moment has lent itself to. Yet whether I say one thing or another it is a joy to communicate. To express, to share, to dialogue and to converse. The joy of writing is simply one form of the greater opportunity to communicate and be heard and to be heard and listened to is to be known. To be known is be accepted and/or rejected, to pre-judged or mis-judged, to be understood or ignored. Communication allows for connectivity to the community.

To be apart of a community is a pure joy because in community we are best known, best understood, and best ourselves. It is a joy to be in community where connection makes communication the most valuable. If I blog and some one out there misreads or misinterprets my words or intentions then so be it. But in community I can be given an opportunity to clarify, or codify, what I wish to communicate. I may even be corrected in my communication if it is false or misguided or misinformed but in community context that two leads to a deeper joy.

Joy, is it in you? Find it in the Christmas story and live in it all the year 'round.

Currently reading :
Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement
By Lauren Sandler
Release date: By 07 September, 2006

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Repeat the Sounding Joy! Repeeeeeat the Sounding Joy!
Current mood: cheerful
Category: Quiz/Survey

As I prepare for Christmas with a few last minute shopping trips and face long lines and puzzlingly mean spirited people willingly to run you over to get a parking space 3 cars closer then me I can't help but ask the question "How did we let it go this far and get this bad." The crass commercialism and materialistic gluttony of the Christmas season is antithetical to the whole origin of Christmas.

While I could dwell and rant about all that is wrong with Christmas I rather choose instead to take time to pause and remind first myself and then you about the true meaning behind Christmas. We celebrate Christmas not simply to celebrate a child born in humble manger but the whole of the life of Christ. The gift was not merely a baby rather the entire life and culmination of that life and accomplishments of Christ in total.

Jesus Christ was humbly born in a manger, but the must humbling fact was that He was God come in the flesh. He humbled himself to the utmost by not just becoming human, but coming into and entering humanity the same way you and I did: naked and bloody and hollerin for our mama. He came not into a royal family of privilege but into a blue collar, working class family. As a young man he learned a trade. He lived a sinless life of perfection and extended the most valuable of gifts to us all: His very lifes blood and breathe.

We celebrate Christmas not just to remember the fact that He was born and live. We celebrate Christmas because Jesus lived, did not sin, worked miracles, and then suffered and bled and died for OUR SIN and was buried, and was 3 days dead before Resurrecting. This substitutionary atoning death secured for us mercy, God on longer must punish OUR SIN by calling for our blood. This Resurrection secured for us grace, not only is our sin covered, our salvation has been secured for eternity, our destiny has been altered to include eternal community with God and his people. Christmas is the beginning and is inextricably linked with Easter as complimentary bookends of our own spiritual journeys.

Without Christmas, Easter would be meaningless because if God had not entered into human history, and merged with us in the space-time continium then we would not have had a sinless human representative to secure for us a life worthy of being sacrificed as a spotless Lamb of atonement. But without Easter and the actual sacrificial blood being spilled we would have no covering of sin and without the resurrected life of Christ we would have no hope of eternal life ourselves and could only look forward to death as an end to everything, rather than a portal into a resurrected state that John the Revelator tells us is to a place to indesribably beautiful and awesome for human comprehension.

So Merry Christmas. It is only because of Jesus that we understand the true nature of sacrificial gift giving. Give joyously but more than that remember what you were truly given and why. The one gift that we most desperately need is the same gift that we most assuredly cannot recieve on our own. No amount of money, no amount of giving on our part, no amount of goodness in attempt to make Santa's list nor earn salvation can secure this gift in our own power or of our own strength, wealth, or merit. God, gave to us, in the birth, life, cruxifixion, burial, and resurrection the one gift we all need.

So you can have your precious parking space and your cut in the check out line. But I hope ultimately you find true joy and happiness in the gift of salvation through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. A relationship with God awaits you. Will you unwrap it this year? I truly hope so.