I turn . . .wiggle . . . shuffle. . . I try to close my eyes and shut out the glare of the sun but nothing works. Of course, my bright white torso reflecting rays that would normally be lost in the bronze tone of a native doesn’t help my predicament.
But this is exactly the reason I am in this desperate quagmire. Hopefully after five days of tropical life, my entrance onto the beach will no longer be greeted by cries of “LOOK, A GREAT WHITE WHALE!” followed by well-meaning naturists attempting to save the environment by returning me to my natural habitat.
Once I have attained my tanning goals, my entrance will be greeted by cries of “LOOK, A GREAT BROWN WHALE!. . . wait a minute, I’ve never heard of a great brown whale! It must be a natural phenomenon! Push him in the ocean! We must save the ONE Great Brown Whale in existence!” At which point the same. . .continue reading

authored by Michael Esh

I am a techie… anyone who knows me well will confirm that. I enjoy all things tech-related… computers, video editing, live video, sound, lighting, audio recording, and the list goes on. Some of them I am actually quite proficient in, others I just dabble in. It’s fascinating stuff.

The curse that goes along with this is that fact that if I am at a concert, and there is a buzz in the sound system, it drives me bonkers. It might be MercyMe singing “Word Of God Speak”, but all I hear is that buzz (that actually happened, by the way). I can be at church and the whole congregation is in the middle of a beautiful worship moment, but if the computer operator briefly puts the wrong words on the screen, I notice it (that has happened, too.) Or if the worship leader’s voice through the mic sounds “muddy” to me, all I want to do is run over to the sound board and adjust a couple of knobs for that poor sound tech (yup, also happened… WANTING to do it, that is.)

It happened again this past Sunday. We were entering into a beautiful time of worship at church, the worship leader started singing, and his microphone wasn’t turned on. He sang through the whole first line of the song before the sound tech got it on. I leaned over to my friend and said, “The sound man just messed up.” My friend said, “Why, what happened?” He had never noticed. And I started thinking…

What place do all these things have in worship? The lights, the cameras, the graphics, isn’t all this stuff just distracting me? Wouldn’t it be better if there weren’t so many different elements? I mean, if you don’t have a big screen, you can’t accidentally. . . continue reading

Earlier I devoted an entire chapter to what I call the fear of sin and many of you, after reading that chapter, questioned me on what sin is? While it may have appeared as though the definition was overlooked, not defining sin in that chapter was done purposefully.

The problem is that sin cannot be defined. We like to have lists of things from which we stay away but that can hardly pass as a definition of sin. Even if you have a list of rights and wrongs that continues on for ten thousand pages, can you say you have defined sin?

I might have one list that I consider to be appropriate for a Christian and someone else will have their list and, by George, he has stuff on his list that I will never allow and I have stuff on my list that he will never allow and so, determined to define sin by our actions, we go on and create innumerable groups and subgroups, all of us certain of our doctrine and even more certain that the others are erroneous in their doctrine and here we sit, grasping our beliefs close to our self-righteous hearts, knowing smugly. . . continue reading. . .