Monthly Archives: October 2011

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Catch that Panther Pride

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I am writing from home this weekend. I hail from a very special community that exists in southwest Ohio. This weekend is Homecoming. The high school is on fire with school pride. I love high school pride. It is one of my top favorite things. A lot of people think it’s fake or phony or something, but I think that is mostly because you read Catcher in the Rye in high school. In Catcher in the Rye, everything is phony. So we can’t trust that.

School spirit can be a really cool thing. It unites people. It energizes them. It drives creativity. When I was a senior, one of my good friends got elected to Homecoming Court for the first time. We were all really excited, but the thing was that he was the voice of our class. One day, I’m pretty sure he’s going to host The Price is Right. He was supposed to emcee the halftime show, not be in it. And so the school had to find a replacement. They asked me to do it, and I accepted because I had a public speaking course that semester, and I was pretty sure that talking in front of a classroom was the same thing as talking in front of a football stadium.

It wasn’t.

And there are all of these pictures of me looking a little bit awkward. But I think if you listened to a recording of the halftime show, you would find that I may have done relatively well. And I loved it. I loved every minute of it.

I bring all of this up because this story is the first time I was asked to be THE MAN in a situation. If the halftime show had failed, it would have been on me. But it didn’t. And this whole experience was brought about because of school spirit.

I have one legitimate little brother, but I really have three little brothers who are all seniors at my hometown high school. And I got to see today how good school spirit has been for all of them. I went to the Homecoming pep rally. My real brother was dressed up as a cheerleader. And my other two brothers rapped. And it was great. But everyone was surprised. (Not so much about my cheerleader brother; people expect things like that from him.) But multiple teachers approached me during the day and said, “I didn’t know Zach and AJ rapped.” My point is that perhaps these teachers would have never known if not for school spirit.


What’s your Homecoming story?

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Praying for Pokemon Cards

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I struggle a lot with prayer. I never know how specific I should get with my prayers. Should I be asking God to give me Ferraris, introduce me to Zooey Deschanel, and become a best-selling author? I don’t know. But sometimes I feel like a little kid when I pray, asking for things that I think I want but actually don’t. What was the number one request of child Spencer? Pokemon cards. Do I still use my Pokemon cards? No. I wish I had asked for books. Lots and lots of books. And I feel like this is what it’s like when we come to God for something. God knows our own destinies infinitely better than we do and so asking an omniscient being for things seems a bit childish.

For a long time, I thought prayer was silly because of this passage from Jesus in Matthew:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. (Matthew 6:25-26)

Notice how this passage says nothing about prayer. I was severely misguided in my thoughts. See, Jesus, only a few verses earlier is teaching his disciples how to pray. I guess I always kind of glossed over that part because it wasn’t a very compelling story. But there is a very compelling story of prayer that happens really early on in the Bible.

This story occurs in Genesis 18. Abraham has been hanging out with God for a while. Abraham was one of those cool people that God actually walked around with. And they chatted, probably hiking mountains together and watching the sunrise and cool stuff like that. But in Genesis 18, God tells Abraham that he is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities that have fallen into such sin that they would make Las Vegas look like Heaven on Earth. This doesn’t sit well with Abraham. So he asks God if God will save Sodom and Gomorrah if there are at least 50 righteous people in these cities. God grants that He won’t. And Abraham asks, “Well what about 45?” And again God grants that He won’t. All of this goes on for a while until Abraham gets down to 5, and God again grants that 5 righteous people would be enough.

This story is so powerful. Obviously, God never intended to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there were righteous people there, but it was important that Abraham ask for their salvation. Sometimes, we get it into our head that if God already knows everything, then we don’t need to ask him for anything. But God wants us to. He wants to have a personal relationship with us. He wants to talk and hear about our lives, and even though He knows how He can make it better, He wants to know how we think it could be made better.

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Lost Time

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I spent my entire Saturday afternoon and evening watching the last seven or eight episodes of Lost. I love Lost. I would probably write a blog post about it, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone because I think it is that sacred. But anyway, I spent roughly ten hours watching the end of Lost. And I’m not about to say that it was a waste of time because it wasn’t. That television show is part of the reason I began to reconsider my faith, but I have this horrible feeling that my Saturday could have been better spent.

I don’t think I am quite alone in this. I live in a college town. I go to school. Most of my friends are my age and in school and almost everyone has the same problem. We are binge responsible. There’s this lie out there that we can be good stewards of our time only four or five days out of the week, and we will still be successful.

I think this lie comes from years of dishonoring good stewards. People who manage their time well are rare specimen. They don’t come around very often, but when they do, the rest of us try to bring them back into the muck that is the rest of the world. “Why don’t you come out with us?” we ask them. “Why don’t you watch television?” “You don’t take enough time for yourself.” “You should do something fun.” The really good steward of time, though, doesn’t need to go out because she likes the work she does and finds it fun.  But peer pressure is a strong thing. And so instead of admiring and emulating these rare stewards, we make them more like us.

Being a good steward of your time means doing it seven days of the week, 52 weeks a year. The train of life doesn’t stop moving, and every time we jump off after one of our binge responsibility periods, we are missing out on achieving the things we want to do. This doesn’t mean that we all have to be corporately or politically successful or some such thing.

In the nonprofit sector, organizations are advised to pick one mission statement, even if they want to do a lot of other things. Then, if something needs to be cut, they know that they can go after the things that aren’t directly related to their mission statement. I think we should treat our lives similarly. We should pick one, two, maybe three things that we are really passionate about, and then we should pursue them seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. And then we can start using our time, even our free time, in such a way to bring us closer and closer to our goals.

Are you a good steward of time? What’s your secret?