ignatius: a satirical look at youth pastors

Ignatius from travis hawkins on Vimeo.

death and tacos

Waiting in line at a taco stand for my number to be called
I started talking to a six-year-old kid kicking his little foot against
A curb and waiting for his dad to come out of the bathroom.

And he said, “Why do you cough so much?”
And I said, “Because I have cancer.”
And he said, “Bummer.”
And I said, “Yep.”
And he said, “Does it hurt?”
And I said, “Only when I breathe.”
And he said, “Why don’t you hold your breath?”

And I puffed out my cheeks like Lois Armstrong and
Let him see it and held it for as long as I could
Before exploding into a hacking eruption of
Stupid sounds and saliva.

And he laughed.
And I coughed and laughed.
And he said, “Feel better?”
And I said, “A bit.”

And I showed him how much better with my
Thumb and index finger. And pointed at a green thread
of mucous that had dribbled out onto my chin
He said, “Gross.” And wiping it off
I said, “Yep.”

And he said, “My granddaddy had cancer before he died on the hospital.”
And I said, “You mean in the hospital?”
And he said, “Yeah on the hospital.”
And I said, “Oh, yeah?”
And he said, “He used to give me candy all of the times I ever saw him.”
And I said, “Sorry kid, I don’t have any candy.”
And, deflated, he said, “Are you gonna die on the hospital?”
And I said, “You mean in the hospital?”
And he said, “Yea, are you gonna die on the hospital?”
And I said, “Probably.”
And he said, “OK.”

And, upon giving that gracious consent, the boy’s dad came out and
The boy said, “Well, bye!” And I said, “See ya.”
And he ran off.
And, for a while, between the two of us,
Dying became so very ordinary, like candy or tacos or semantics,
And death itself suddenly just this obnoxious third-wheel
A pitiful nuisance with nothing better to do with his time
Than to tag along with me and this six-year-old kid.
And I sat smiling in the sun and imagining death at the moment,
A sad sack of lonely-self slumped somewhere in the distance,
As I waited for my number to come up.

- Nathaniel Whittemore

how to save the lost

From Slice of Laodicea:

I wonder if the 12 Apostles staged Greek-style wrestling matches to draw young men to Christ? No record of that anywhere in the Scriptures. Chariot races are also not mentioned anywhere in the book of Acts as a method drawing a crowd to hear the Gospel. All the Apostles had was the Holy Spirit who worked through their preaching to save the lost. That was all they needed.

Pastors today don’t believe in the Holy Spirit. He doesn’t exist to them. That’s why they behave like fools in ever more desperate attempts to draw a crowd. Here’s a pastor in South Dakota who says that the church is having a hard time attracting young men. That’s because the “church” was never intended to attract young men or anyone else. The Holy Spirit alone draws through Spirit-empowered preaching. Such preaching is absent today in our prayerless, man-centered churches, and that’s why pastors are reduced to becoming jesters and exhibitionists to draw a crowd.

words, words, words

An interesting observation about word definitions and their (mis)use...

Yesterday, I ran my first Articulate Seminar. It was tremendous fun and I found that talking about writing with people from different industries illuminated old problems in new ways for me. Andrew Yeomans came along from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and afterwards he sent me his delightful deconstruction of press release hype:

“This amazing, prestigious and sophisticated product is a quantum leap forward and performance is a greater order of magnitude, and will decimate the competition. The enormity of this tremendous advance indicates our commitment to servicing our customers in a forensically sound manner.”

Various dictionaries give:

• amazing 1. Causing distraction, consternation, confusion, dismay; stupefying, terrifying, dreadful.
• prestigious 1. Practising juggling or legerdemain; of the nature of or characterized by juggling or magic; cheating, deluding, deceitful; deceptive, illusory.
• sophisticated 1. Mixed with some foreign substance; adulterated; not pure or genuine. 2. a. Altered from, deprived of, primitive simplicity or naturalness. Of a literary text: altered in the course of being copied or printed. 3. a. Falsified in a greater or less degree; not plain, honest, or straightforward.
• quantum 5. Physics. A minimum amount of a physical quantity which can exist and by multiples of which changes in the quantity occur.
• magnitude 3. A class in a system of classification determined by size. a. Each of the classes into which the fixed stars have been arranged according to their degree of brilliancy. Now regarded as a number on a continuous scale representing the negative logarithm of the brightness, such that a decrease of five magnitudes represents a hundred-fold increase in brightness and a decrease of one magnitude an increase of 2·512 times.
• decimate 4. transf. a. To kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten of.
• enormity (-nôrmt) n., pl. e·nor·mi·ties. 1. The quality of passing all moral bounds; excessive wickedness or outrageousness. 2. A monstrous offense or evil; an outrage.
• tremendous \Tre*men”dous\, a. [L. tremendus that is to be trembled at, fearful, fr. tremere to tremble.] Fitted to excite fear or terror; such as may astonish or terrify by its magnitude, force, or violence; terrible; dreadful; as, a tremendous wind; a tremendous shower; a tremendous shock or fall.
• advance \Ad*vance”\, v. t. 7. To furnish, as money or other value, before it becomes due, or in aid of an enterprise; to supply beforehand
• commitment \Com*mit”ment\, n. 4. A doing, or perpetration, in a bad sense, as of a crime or blunder; commission.
• service \Serv”ice\, n. 11. Copulation with a female; the act of mating by male animals
• forensic Relating to, used in, or appropriate for courts of law or for public discussion or argumentation.
• sound a. Meaningless noise. b. Thorough; complete: a sound flogging.

So the translation is:

“This confusing, dreadful, deceitful, illusory, adulterated, dishonest product is the smallest possible small step forward and provides less than half the performance, and will kill very few of our competitors. The monstrous evil of our releasing this dreadful product before it is ready demonstrates our crimes in screwing over our clients, see you in court where we will speak complete nonsense.”