Monthly Archives: September 2008

call+response

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“Never forget justice is what love looks like in public.”

These powerful words are proclaimed by Cornel West in a new documentary titled Call+Response, a film highlighting the virtually unknown reality that there are more slaves today than at any other time in human history. (By the film creators estimate there are currently 27 million human slaves throughout the world).

Considered to be “the first feature rockumentary,” Call+Response features some of today’s most prominent political and cultural figures (including Cornel West, Madeleine Albright, Ashley Judd and Nicholas Kristof) along with performances by Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed music artists (including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Switchfoot and Five For Fighting).

The goal of those involved in the film is simple: abolish slavery in our lifetime.

Is their goal possible? I’m not sure. I think it will only happen if “their” goal becomes “your/our” goal, but the mix of intellect and influence that all these celebs offer to the project – along with their sincere concern about such an unthinkable issue – gives me hope that enough people will not only receive a “Call” to watch this film, but also feel called to be part of the “Response” to do something.

I want to believe that Cornel West’s words will become true in reality and not just spoken in truth…that a movement of justice as a public expression of love will sweep across the world, defeating all forms of hatred and injustice and transforming people’s hearts in the process.

Is this realistic hope or just wishful thinking?

Does it really matter?

What do we have to lose in trying? Is it possible to fail if we never give up?

What does the Lord require of you?
To act justly
and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with God.  (Micah 6:8)

Call+Response is opening in select cities on October 10th. For my friends in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area*, it will be playing at the AMC Arbor Lakes Theater (Maple Grove) from October 17-19 and the Landmark Lagoon (Uptown) from October 20-23.

To learn more about the film, including a list of cities where it will be in theaters, visit callandresponse.com.

Here’s the trailer:

* If anyone would like to get a group together to watch the film, feel free to use the comments section below to make that happen.

cheapo memories

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“I like money.”

This obvious statement is uttered by one of the many stupid characters in last year’s wildly unsuccessful movie Idiocracy. While saying “I like money” is obviously obvious – everyone likes money – I think that’s why it’s funny. Idiocracy got terrible reviews (like, almost straight-to-DVD bad), so there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it, but I actually thought it was pretty good; so allow me to give a quick summary that will put the quote about money in context. Luke Wilson stars as an Army librarian who is considered to be the most average person in the entire military, and because of this distinction he is selected to participate in a top-secret experiment (he is frozen for a year). Through a series of unforseen events, he remains frozen for a bit longer (500 years) and when he finally thaws out (in the year 2505) he discovers that humans have become exponentially dumber and he is now the smartest person in the world. When he is forced to interact with the idiots who now make up the world’s population, he resorts to the most basic of all human motivators, bribery. He offers a man named Frito (yes, like the corn chips) several billions of dollars to help him (remember that with inflation this isn’t much money). It’s at this point that Frito utters the obvious response, “I like money.”

To me, this is funny, but maybe you have to see the movie to see the humor (view the trailer here). Regardless of whether or not you like stupid comedies, I’m quite sure you like money. If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of our life trying to find ways to make, save or somehow obtain enough money for an endless list of reasons.

I have been a full-time grad student for the last two years, and I’ve been only “partially-employed” during this time. As you might expect, taking loans and stealing money from my savings to pay for tuition, rent, gas, food and insurance kind of forces a person to develop an attitude about money that is much different than at other “fully-employed” stages of life. I have been living a very simple/no-frills lifestyle for the last two years. I graduated last spring and am now closing in on full-time employment (with benefits, hopefully), so I’m already getting excited about a life with a little extra coin to throw around, you know, stimulate the economy a little bit. I’ve been carefully determining how to put money aside for my next big purchase; a new computer (I’m waiting for the new macbooks to be released, which is rumored to be Oct. 14).

I saved some of the money I made teaching at the seminary this summer, I’ll hide the money I get for coaching at basketball tryouts recently, and since I already paid the deposit for my new apartment I’m going to save the money I get back from the deposit at my old apartment. I’m even considering going back to my old “job” of donating plasma twice a week (don’t laugh, it pays well and it’s really easy). Making big purchases is never an easy decision, especially when you’re just barely making enough to pay your monthly expenses, but having a good and trustworthy computer is about as important a possession as there is in my daily life (second probably only to my car). I would probably consider my computer a necessity (when I’m away from my computer, or somewhere without wireless, I feel like something is missing. I hope I’m not the only one who feels this way about their computers) – so of all the things I could buy that cost more than a pair of jeans, I can justify buying a new computer more than anything else. I actually think the reason Apple has become so popular and successful is because they help create/inspire feelings of dependence and euphoria within their customers, about their products. So you could actually argue that in buying a mac I’m actually joining a cult (for more on this argument, read Douglas Atkin’s book The Culting of Brands).

Sorry for all the tangents, I promise there’s a point to this, stick with me if you can.

I was hanging out with my sister at her house yesterday (by the way, her health is continuing to improve…thanks for all the comments and emails in response to what I shared last week). While at her house, I decided to look through some of the boxes of my stuff that have been stored in her basement ever since I lived there a few years ago. While looking for something else, I found a large collection of my old CDs, some of them from when I had my first CD player as a little guy in 6th grade. I was overwhelmed with memories looking through albums by some of my favorite artists from my earlier years. I found albums by Boyz II Men, Blind Melon and even Coolio. It was a lot of fun thinking back on the memories represented by all this music. I mean seriously, who doesn’t smile thinking about middle school and the ackward slow dances while “On Bended Knee” was playing, or watching that little girl running around dressed like a bumble bee in the video for “No Rain”, and how awesome was “Fantastic Voyage”?

For a while now I’ve been thinking about going through my old CDs and taking them to a store that buys used discs, if for no other reason, just to see how much I could get for them. Yesterday that idea came to life. I am usually a packrat. Nearly everything I’ve ever touched has sentimental meaning, which makes moving every year a real treat, but somehow yesterday I overcame my nostalgic nature and sorted through hundreds of CDs that included the songs that made up the soundtrack of my life as a teenager. It was quite an accomplishment for me, all things considered, and as I drove to the Cheapo Records near my sister’s house with a box full of CDs in the back seat of my car, my heart was filled with memories and in the back of my mind were plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t get rid of the discs that had brought all those memories back. You see, for me, getting rid of the source of a memory feels like losing the memory all together. I know this isn’t how it is in reality, but that’s still how it feels to me. I overcame these previews of regret by reminding myself that I haven’t listened to any of those CDs for years and, until that morning, hadn’t even known where they were stored. Plus I was going to get a fair amount of money for them that would go toward my new computer, so I drove on and dropped off the box, being told that it would take about 30 minutes to determine how much they could give me for my precious collection of classics.

During the time between dropping off the CDs and waiting to go back to hear the verdict, I tried to determine a dollar amount that would be enough to make me feel okay about selling them – as if you can place a value on memories – but my online research on how much to expect to get paid for used CDs was fairly inconclusive (every site said the same thing, “the price we pay is dependent on condition and demand”). I knew I probably paid between ten and fifteen bucks for each of the 125 CDs I brought in, they were all still in good condition and since I’m the one who bought them in the first place, I thought they were all pretty good, so I figured there should be other people who would pay for them. I drove back to Cheapo a few hours later to collect a small fortune for recycling my music. The guy working there fit the stereotype of a used record store employee to the T, complete with thick-black plastic frame glasses, floppy hair, old jeans and a ratty t-shirt that definitely could have been purchased at a local thrift store. I couldn’t see his shoes because he was standing behind a counter the whole time, but I’d bet he was wearing an old pair of New Balance. (Side note: I guarantee this guy reads Chuck Klosterman, or at least claims he does, and my internal jury is still out on whether he enjoys or is offended by Stuff White People Like.) Yep, this hipster found the perfect job to fit his lifestyle and personality, and now he was guy who would define the value of a large portion of my music collection. When I walked back into the store I saw my CDs on the counter in three stacks of nearly equal height. The previously described hipster recognized me as the guy who had brought in a box of old hip-hop and R&B CDs (I’m guessing he wasn’t impressed, although I guarantee that dude listened to Coolio back in the day), and without saying much, he unpeeled a post-it note from atop one of the stacks and explained that my discs fit into three different categories; some value, little value and nearly no value. He could give me $78 for the CDs in one of the stacks, $0.25 each for the CDs in another stack, and only $0.10 for each in the final stack. All together, my collection of musical memories was only worth $88.  <insert curse words here>  I froze for a minute as he let me think about what I wanted to do. It’s not that I thought I would get rich from this exchange, but the reality that my collection of Janet Jackson CDs for instance, were worth less than a dollar (combined) was a lot to take in all at once. So as it went, deflated, I walked back out to my car with an empty box in my hand and 88 bucks in my pocket.

Things had not played out as I had hoped, but as I’ve been reminded time and time again lately, such is life. I don’t mean to be cynical or cliche, but honestly, this is just how life is sometimes. I never thought I’d quit working in my mid-20s to pursue a master’s degree in theology, spending over half my savings in the process and taking on more school loans. My sister and her husband never thought they’d wait so long to get pregnant, and when they did finally conceive they never imagined it would result in so much pain and confusion (and no child). As a little boy, the guy working at Cheapo probably didn’t think he’d be stocking racks and making stacks of used CDs when he grew up, and Luke Wilson and the other people involved in Idiocracy could have never predicted it would do as poorly as it did, but they are still moving forward and trying to put it behind them. As one of the most influential poets of my generation (2Pac) shares on one of the CDs I no longer own, “life goes on.”

Life goes on even though our lives may not always result in memories that end up being worth as much as we had hoped or imagined, but there is still hope that things will one day get better. As a person of faith, I put my hope in Christ as the sign that God will fulfill the promise found in Revelation 21:5, “behold I make all things new.” I like new stuff, but it only takes one bad experience to realize that even new things can disappoint and fail to meet our expectations, but the “new” that God promises to bring will be better than anything we’ve ever imagined (even better than HDTV and new macbooks). This new creation will be the fulfillment of God’s ultimate will for the world, transforming things to be how they were always intended; perfect. In the meanwhile, Matthew 6:19-20 reminds us not to care so much about stuff.

“Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth, where moth and rust will destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust will not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.”

one month

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It’s been over a month since I posted anything.

This isn’t going to be an excuse for why it’s been so long…life just happened and I didn’t write anything. I’ll admit that I have spent some time lately trying to figure out how to break the silence…this is it.

Some people use their blogs as online journals, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I didn’t start this site to share the details of my personal life. I created anewdoxology almost a year ago to share my thoughts about faith, culture and life in hopes that it might connect with people in real and perhaps even meaningful ways. I wrote about the music I was listening to and the movies and TV shows I was watching and I did my best to draw connections between these pop-culture things and my beliefs as a clumsy Christian.

I haven’t always posted new content as often as I’d like or spent as much time working on future articles as I would prefer, but somehow I kept thinking of things to share and finding time to write. Although I’ve rarely shared enough information about myself to make it feel like you are reading someone’s journal, I would think you could always see that there was a real person behind the words, that person has always been me.

In the beginning, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to write enough to justify having a blog. I knew I had a lot of thoughts and ideas, but I wasn’t sure if they would translate into actual entries. Even if they somehow did, I wasn’t sure if anyone would take the time to read them. So I started writing a blog in secret. That probably sounds weird, but I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. So I spent time writing and editing entries in a word document until I had enough to know that I could keep it going. (Note: that word document ended up being the source for a lot of the content I posted during the first few months. Copy and paste.)

But like I said, it’s now been over a month since I posted anything.

A lot can happen in a month.

I’m not sure if it’s necessary that I warn you about this, but in just a few spins of the mouse wheel I’m going to be as open about my personal and family life as I’ve ever been on here, and I know some of you might be thinking, “What’s the big deal Andy? There’s only a dozen people reading this anyway, and we already know you.” If that’s what you’re thinking I guess you kinda have a point (although I hope there are more than a dozen people who still check the site from time to time, even though the guy who writes it seems to have quit lately). But in all honesty, there aren’t a lot of people who I’ve talked to about what’s been going on in my life the past month, and as I’ve been reminded several times lately, what is a “big deal” to one person is not as big of a deal to everyone else.

I’m not going to share these things about to make an excuse for the long pause in my writing. I’m not even sharing all this to explain why I haven’t added anything new for over a month. I’m writing because I don’t know how else to break the silence and I think sometimes the most powerful narratives aren’t the ones we read in books or watch in movies, but they’re the ones happening right in front of us…our stories.

This is part of the story of what’s been going on in my life and in the lives of some people I care a lot about over the past month. It’s not a bestselling novel or a blockbuster movie, but it’s true, and even if you haven’t experienced things like this yourself, I’m guessing you can relate just the same.

I started the month of August with my family at our cabin. It was a relaxing weekend. The weather was beautiful and most of our conversations included something about the fact that both my sisters were pregnant and due within a week of each other around Christmastime (it was the first child for both of them).

I rode home that Sunday with my oldest sister and her husband who had recently found out they were having a boy. During the car ride they asked me to be their son’s godfather (I accepted) and then told me that his middle name was going to be Andrew (I smiled). I was already excited to become an uncle, but now my nephew would also be my godson and would share part of my name. I felt a special connection to the little guy and I wished I didn’t have to wait another five months to meet him. If I would have known then what would happen, I definitely would have been more patient.

I got home from the cabin just in time to throw my bags on my bed and drive to church and preach at Journey. My message that night was a response to the question “what does it mean to be a witness?” and with the help of a few videos we took at look at several memorable events that we have all witnessed, and then thought about how our lives have been shaped and changed by these things forever. The message eventually turned to faith and what it means to not only know that God loves us, but to be witnesses of this love to others.

The next day I flew to California to spend a week editing footage for a documentary about the people I’ve met and the things I’ve witnessed over the last three years in Haiti.

The second day I was in California I talked to my mom and learned that my oldest sister was in the hospital. She had an emergency surgery a few days later, and just before getting on my flight back to Minnesota I got a message from my brother-in-law saying that my sister had gone into labor and there was no way the baby would make it (it was just too early). I called my mom when my flight landed and as I sat outside the baggage claim at the Minneapolis airport I heard the story of my nephew’s birth. She told me that he only weighed a little over a pound, had tiny fingernails and toenails, and was already starting to look like his dad. I didn’t have any words to say, but sitting in silence and shedding a few tears I knew that this was one of those event that everyone in my family would always remember.

My sister had been put under since before her surgery a few days earlier, so she wasn’t even awake when she gave birth, and soon after the delivery she went in for another surgery. She woke up a few days later and had to be told everything that had happened when she was asleep. The rest of us had been dealing with the loss of the baby for days, but now she was just finding out that the baby that had been growing inside of her, the child she had wanted for so long, the boy we had all been praying for, was gone.

I wish I could say the first few days were the most difficult, but really, every day was hard. The days between losing the baby and my sister waking up were hard because we wanted her to get better physically, and we were worried about how she’d handle the news emotionally. The day my sister woke up was hard because the pain and confusion of losing the baby started all over for everyone as we began going through it with her. My brother-in-law and my parents had been in the room when my sister gave birth, and because of the nature of the situation the hospital had kept the baby in the morgue in case my sister wanted to hold him. Perhaps the actual “hardest” day was a few days after my sister woke up and decided she wanted to see her son. We all showed up early that morning and dressed nice, we talked for a minute and then we just waited silently for them to bring him up to the room.

What happened in the hospital room that morning was close to what I had been impatiently excited about on the ride home from my cabin just a few weeks earlier, but my imagination of that scene would look and feel like didn’t include so many sad tears and confusion. That morning I watched my sister holding her son for the first time. I watched my mom take pictures of my sister and her husband with their baby boy, her first grandchild. And for me, well, I never imagined meeting my nephew would be like that. I held him in my arms and thought about all the things I had hoped to do with him, about what kind of uncle and godfather I would have been for him. Through tears I looked down at a little boy who wasn’t quite ready to enter the world, but who would never be forgotten. I was overcome with the urge to break the painful silence in that room and proudly proclaim to my family that in my arms I was holding Emmanuel Andrew…my nephew and godson, the grandson of Tom and Julie, and the son of Roberta and Heruy. I felt like that moment and especially Emmanuel’s life needed to be validated, but for some reason I couldn’t find the courage to say anything. I felt almost paralyzed in emotion, so I sniffled a few last tears and realized that as difficult as that moment and a majority of the surrounding moments had been and would be, there was still hope in that hospital room. I felt a special connection to my nephew because my name was his middle name, but everyone in that room had a special connection to him because he was part of our family. It was his first name that reminded me of the hope that we all needed. My sister and her husband had wanted to be parents for a long time, and with that desire to have a child, they had spent a lot of time considering names. Although I’m biased since my name ended up being chosen, I think they made an especially great choice with the first name. The name Emmanuel comes from the Bible and is found in Matthew’s version of the Christmas story when an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him that his wife Mary is pregnant with a son who will save his people from their sins. This is seen as the fulfillment of what God said through the prophet Isaiah about the virgin being pregnant with a son who would be called Emmanuel, which means “God with us.”

If things had gone according to schedule, Emmanuel Andrew might have been born on Christmas day of this year (December 25 my sister’s due date), but it didn’t work out that way and we’ll never understand why. It will never be easy to think about, but no matter how many tears we cry or questions we ask, nothing can change the fact that Emmanuel was and always will be part of our family, and we love him very much. I’m sad that I’ll never get to teach him how to play basketball or take him to the kids movies I wanted to see anyway, but I’m thankful for the reminder that his name offers us…God is with us, even though it’s a little more difficult to see and understand right now.

The rest of the month was a blur. We all spent hours and days at a time at the hospital hanging out with my sister during her roller-coaster 27 day consecutive day visit. Somewhere between the end of August and the day she finally went home, I managed to move into a new apartment. Although I’m still not quite settled because I’ve chosen to spend several days at my sister’s house watching movies, taking walks in the back yard and reminding her to take her medicine. Her health continues to improve every day and we’re hopeful that she’ll be back to normal in the not-so-distant future.

It’s now fall and it seems like everyone is in a rush to get ready for something important. Academic years, church programs, political elections are all starting or on the horizon, and nearly every school in the country will soon be holding some form of homecoming celebration (I’ll be going to my five year college reunion in a few weeks). I have been talking to a few students who were part of the youth ministry I used to be involved with quite a bit lately. They are both beginning their first year of college, adjusting to life away from home and parents for the first time, adapting to a new understanding of homework and studying, and even experiencing the effects of distance and new realities on old relationships.

As I look back on the last month of my life, it’s been difficult not to look back on everything else as well. The more I think about my life and everything I’ve gone through – especially when I’m having conversations with 18-year-old’s who are facing some of the most difficult stuff they’ve ever experienced – I think about how far I’ve come and the reasons I’ve been able to get to where I am today. I have a great family, wonderful friends and have been lucky enough have had great teachers, coaches and mentors who all had a significant impact on who I’ve become. But as much as each of those people have done for me throughout my life, I was holding the reason for everything I am in my hands in that hospital room a few weeks ago.

It was a little baby boy who changed the world for everyone, forever.

Emmanuel. God is with us.

By the way, my other sister is healthy and her pregnancy is going well. We’re all very excited to meet her baby girl who is due at the end of December.