You literally won't get it

Because even I won't get it, and I'm writing it.

What is poverty?  What does that word mean directly to you right now?  What is hardship in your life?  What are tough times?

When I think about all of these I believe I have had them in spades.

At one point we had two cars.  The first one got stolen, and then recovered in very bad, un-drivable shape.  The second one just stopped working, wiring some where was killing the battery.  Then somebody loaned us a crappy car, and that one broke down.  Then I was driving a work van, but it was a two seater and I didn't want to put our baby in the back cage with the tools.  Then my brother loaned us a pickup truck and we put the car seat in the middle when we had to go somewhere.  It was winter time and the weather dropped to below zero, I went out to get in the truck and the driver side door handle broke off in my hand.

We had five cars, and the only one we could drive was a pickup truck sitting three wide where everybody had to get in through the passenger side door.

Those were tough times.  I drank a lot.  We had an eight hundred square foot condo which was nicely situated in a neighborhood where cars were stolen regularly.  I would watch netflix and fall asleep on the floor because I was working a ton of hours.  I would wake up when my one year old would crawl over and slap my face.  It was her favorite game.  My wife was working even more hours than I was.

Somebody once asked during that time what was good in my life, I said "nothing is good in my life" and started crying.

Those were times of poverty, that was pure hardship.

My grandfather once told me that during the great depression they were lucky because they had chickens and could eat eggs.  Anytime anybody came over and they were hungry his mom would cook them an egg.  Bob ate eggs for three years straight.  He doesn't like eggs anymore.

He was a runner, state record holder in New York in the mile for seventeen years.  He would run along the rail road tracks and pick up coal that fell off the trains that went past so they wouldn't freeze to death at night.

His older brother died in WWII, and as soon as he was seventeen Bob signed up too.

I don't get it.  I mean I literally can't fathom times that hard.  Is a country salvageable where difficult times include a working car, enough money to buy cheap liquor and warm house?

I know there are people who have it much worse then I do, but as Bob said, they were lucky too.

Tithing and Church

Tithing and church are two totally different things.  I've often heard, and truthfully have said myself, "I don't really put all my tithe into our home church, I give to a couple of different groups and some to my church because I don't really think they are great stewards of all of my tithe."

Let's break that down.  The first thing is, it's usually a lie.  Unlike Mark Zukerburg, our giving is not a billion dollars in 2013 and is not published.  But I bet if you did publish it, almost nobody who uttered the above sentence gave an actual tithe of 10%, in total, anywhere.  Secondly, if you are spreading it around it's not a tithe, a tithe by definition is giving money to church.

However, and it's a big however, the statement itself is usually true.  Most churches are not great stewards of money.  Let's think about an average church.  Most are extremely building heavy and personal heavy.  They are usually paying fairly ineffective people and a giant unused building.  Sorry all of my church friends, this is certainly not the case for all but it tends to be more the average than it should be.

Next let's talk about what churches should be getting in tithes.  I will use round numbers to make it simple.  Let's say there are two hundred members, or one hundred households.  If they are all median incomes earners, lets say 51k per household from 2013 numbers, then the tithe would be $5k per family.  That's half a million dollars for an average church.  My church has over 1000 people and a budget of 1.5 million, or $1,500 per person.  This is right in line with the average 3% giving that goes for healthy in the United States of.

To get back on track, if small local churches had an income of 500k a year and a larger but not big church had a budget of $5,000,000, that would be great right?  I'm not so sure.  I've heard a LOT of sermons about being faithful givers, and I've heard a much smaller number of sermons about a church being wise stewards.  Those latter sermons usually come with the somber admittance that tithing is down and the church will have to right size it's staff.

The sermon I have never heard is: If you guys (the congregation) actually gave what you should give, this is what church would look like.  Imagine a sermon speaking to how much more a church SHOULD be doing.  The problem is, when tithing is up a church just expands or, at best, pays down debt.  Not to degrade paying down debt, but what should a church really be doing?

If I'm average, and I am, and I actually tithe 5k of my 50k income, that 5k is the second largest line item on my annual budget.  Housing is number one, I own two cars free and clear so that is probably a normal second but health insurance, food and tithing are all about a tie.

Think about that, Health insurance is a rip off, and then food!  Is my church as impact-full on my life as food...

Let's think about this in a different way.  In his seminal article, 1,000 true fans, Kevin Kelly discusses that any artist should be able to support themselves with a 1,000 true fans that give them 1 days wages a year, or in his calculation roughly $100 per year.  That would give a church of a 1000 true tithers the ability to house fifty artists. 50.

Five full time authors.

Five full time musicians.

Five full maintenance technicians to fix peoples homes and cars.

Five full time preachers.

Five full time children's ministry pastors.

Ten part time children's ministry helpers. 

Five full cooks to feed the needy.

Five full time financial advisors for the church and it's members.

Saving $500,000 every year.

Building with a $41,000 monthly mortgage. 

I know this is too simple.  And I know that people don't really tithe.  And I know, I know, I know.  But why haven't I heard this preached to me.  I'm almost 31, church every Sunday and a lot in between when I was younger.  That's over 1500 messages.  I haven't heard this preached.  I haven't heard this even discussed in Christian circles.

What should be expected when you pay any organization between $3000 - $9000 each and every year if you are the vast majority of Americans.

People should tithe 10% to a church and if they are generous give more money to other organizations.  Church's should be the most amazing thing in a person's life.  Both are under performing, but it seems the dialog is really only focused on one side.

I for one, if anybody is reading this, would love to preach this to any congregation.

weakness

My last post was on the concept that muscles grow when they are broken down.  We go to a point of exhaustion, put ourselves into a state of weakness and from that state new muscles are grown.  This makes sense when it comes to muscles and working out, makes sense in that it feels like a concept we are comfortable with in our minds.

Yet, when we take that concept and put it towards other areas I don't believe that the collective we is comfortable with it at all.

I was once talking to a guy about getting out of debt, we were discussing a talking head who advocates taking on a second job so you can get intense about paying off debt.  "That guy hates families." was the comment made about getting a second job.

Now think about that, my friend believed that somebody hated families because they advocated spending less time with your family for a year or two to get totally financially free.  The truth is, if you want to grow financially you are going to have to be broken down somewhere.  Whether that means taking a second job or cutting your spending down to painful levels or selling something you can't live without.  That is what it takes.  And it's not about hating families, its about sacrifice.

But when it comes to our spiritual selves, it makes me uncomfortable to say "I need to put myself in a place of spiritual weakness to get stronger."  Most of the time what we are sacrificing for spiritual growth is control.  When we give up control we feel weak.  And we feel week because we are!

When you take up the discipline of Solitude you are alone, there is nothing to control when you are totally alone.  When you take up the discipline of fasting you are hungry, probably angry if you are like me, and physically weak.  When you take up the discipline of giving you actually have less money in the here and now.  The discipline of worship means putting something ahead of yourself.  You are starting to get the point.

But I am not comfortable with uttering the words "God wants me weak".  We love to say the Biblical principle of "When I am weak he is strong" when we just screwed up in our lives and we want to justify our being a jack head.  But rarely do you hear people say "I will make myself weak so that he will be made strong".  That is really uncomfortable.  I mean it is actually hard to say those things out loud for me.  Try it, unless you are reading this in a cubicle and you'll get fired, then definitely wait for the car ride home to try it.

Weakness is always bad in our current world system.  Always.  When we meet weakness our job is to figure out how to empower somebody so they are no longer weak.  We create giant walls of protection so that our homes, cars and schools are not weak.  I giant amount of the money we spend is so that we can cover the weak links in our lives; we insure our jobs, cars, houses, health, lives, kids, pets, appliances and vacations.  Weakness, even possible weakness not yet realized, is always bad.

But I find myself spiritually following a man who never shied away from weakness.  He fasted for forty days.  He didn't build a house or business for himself but wandered around and slept on couches or outside.  He didn't own anything of consequence.  Every time he built up a strong following he would say something offensive and a majority of them would leave.  He was arrested, beaten and killed in a very public way.  Weakness was not something he was, he said to the most powerful leader he ever met face to face "The only power you have is the power given to you by my father".  Weakness was not something he was, it was something he invited in, something he did not shy away from, it was something he was, dare we say, comfortable being around.

Control and security are the foundations of our current system.  We work hard to keep them there, and we take pills to calm the anxiety we feel when we might be losing them.  Control is a fantasy for us today, but the man I follow had control over the weather, the crowds, the fish, and most importantly, total control over himself.  And he had all of this from apparent places of weakness.

This is something I struggle through, something that is hard to come to grips with.  But it is something I need to work out if I am going to keep believing the things I believe.

HIIT YOU IN THE FACE!

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is very en vogue right now.  Just work out 15 minutes a week at a super high intensity and you are all set to look like an anorexic winner of the Biggest Loser.  That being said, just go read up on Fartlek workouts (which is the funniest of all workouts because it is truly pronounced fart-lick) and you will see that this has been around for a long time.  That aside, I am a believer in high intensity training, I certainly don't do any of it myself, but I'm sure it works great for other people.

Now on to stuff that is important to me, lets talk about HIIT training in other areas of our life.  If you have read much of my stuff you know my theory of everything and my belief that everything is everything. Therefore, if HIIT works for getting in shape it then must work for other things.

Remember when I talked about Chuck's personal money accumulation strategy?  Well Charles Schwab believes that it takes four things to get super wealthy: talent, leverage, getting all your eggs in one basket, luck.  And, if you have to get rid of one, get rid of talent because the other three are a must.  So it works with money, if you have high intensity (all your eggs in one basket) interval (leverage being recovery time where your muscles grow even when you aren't working out) then at least you have a chance to get lucky.

I believe in our spiritual lives we are actually invited to live this kind of life.  For the last year I have been focused on spiritual disciplines.  We often look at spiritual discipline as the slow moving monk who is trodding through his spiritual faith, cloaked in boredom and perfection.

We are actually invited to take on spiritual disciplines in a very intense and very focused way to get returns very quickly, but usually it is too uncomfortable to take on.

Fasting sucks.  Not eating food is really hard to do.  If you are not eating because of spiritual reasons I believe there is an entirely new element added that makes it even more difficult.  Solitude sucks.  But we are not only called to solitude but Jesus went by himself into the desert.  You know what the best thing to do in the desert is?  Try not to die.  The best pastime is not dying.  And that is where we go to be alone.  Or how about giving, at one point Jesus invites a rich guy to give away everything, that is pretty intense.

So when you are physically training you are hurting your muscles.  Working out is a threat to your body and so after a workout your body tries to protect against that threat happening again by building new muscles or increasing your VO2 max etc.

When we enter spiritual training are we trying to put a hurt on our spiritual muscles or just sitting with our legs crossed humming.  Go put a hurt on your spiritual muscles and watch them actually change for the better.