My alarm clock rang with that horrendous sound at 7:30am last Thursday. I pounded the bedside table searching for the snooze button and found it after a few bone rattling hits. This was not the sound I wanted to hear at this time of day on a holiday. I lay there a few minutes and contemplated my plight: I had to get up early on Thanksgiving.
We stopped by Oak View Baptist Church in Irving to pick up scores of containers of food. We were carting the food to a local apartment complex to feed 400 lower-income folks who had signed up for a complimentary thanksgiving dinner. We set up shop at the common room of the complex just in time to wait another couple hours to start serving. Technically I was glad that I was “serving,” but I didn’t sign up for waiting.
A handful of kids were playing football, jump rope, and catch in the common yard outside of our room. I went outside and started throwing a tennis ball with one of the boys outside. Soon, I was giving out balloons and tossing the football to some of the other kids. In about five minutes, I made some new friends.
The remainder of the food arrived shortly before our kickoff time at noon. We set up the serving lines and started making the plates. The food didn’t seem too be bad—and at times, I wanted to sit down and eat some of that very food. I think my growling stomach played a part of the process.
At first, I was going to serve green beans and corn bread dressing. The dressing stuck to the serving spoon like super-glue on skin, so we called in reinforcements to serve dressing. And so I spooned green beans.
I served a lot of beans. At least eight full trays of green beans. By the end of the afternoon, we had given food to around 200 who lived in that shabby apartment complex. I expected to have this wonderful emotional satisfaction: “I had gotten out of bed early to serve these people, and dangit, I’m going to feel good about myself for doing that good deed. I mean, how many people were willing to do that on their holiday?”
We cleaned up the room and went home, and I could only be glad that it was over.
Not long before we sat down to eat our version of Thanksgiving dinner, my brother-in-law’s brother, Brian, walked in. Brian is 29 and has cancer in his lower back. He hobbled up the stairs and across the room to the nicely appointed table. You would have expected his joints to crack as he gingerly sat down. He shaved his head a few weeks earlier to save himself the grief of plucking patches of hair from his head. Over time, a few islands of stubble reemerged on his very white scalp. You could tell that he was suffering, and you could tell that he didn’t want special treatment.
We ate dinner that day like every Thanksgiving. We thanked God for the food, the family and what we had and chowed down on things that tasted great. We sat around the table and had fun mocking each other while telling good stories. It was like always, but it was different.
I couldn’t help considering my day as I grabbed the plate of turkey for a second serving. I was hoping that my act of service would make me feel food about what a great person I was. Instead I realized that I expected my sacrifice of comfort to be more than it was. Serving people selfishly doesn’t make you a good person. It illustrates that you are a person who wants to appear better than they really are. And so I am: a person who wants to convince you that I’m nicer than I really am.
I was going to come home and tell the stories of how my family served Thanksgiving dinner to a bunch of needy people. And I was going to diffuse the compliments and “that’s cools” while basking in the glow of my good deed. But instead I left realizing that I really did nothing special. I served a few people on one day. A good deed—certainly—but nothing that says, “Andrew, you’re such a servant.”
Of course, I should neither be telling stories nor doing things to elicit that sort of reaction. Who really cares if I’ve convinced people into thinking that I’m a good person?
I glanced across the table and saw Brian sitting there. He seemed antsy to get up and kept fidgeting to find a comfortable position. I’m sure it’s tough to find a comfortable position when you have a tumor in your lower back.
The pain in his body has forced him to constantly keep moving. No position seems to be satisfying. At least not for any significant period of time. And so he moves.
I wonder how many times I get so comfortable with my life that I just sit there. I just sit there and do nothing. I become complacent with who I am and where I am. And I lack the desire to actually move around.
Serving people is like a kick in the butt for me. Watching Brian is another kick. I have become so comfortable in my life that I have become self-serving and lazy. I could have served 4,000 people on Thursday and the personal result would have been the same: I would have realized that a sacrifice of comfort is not really a sacrifice at all. Quite frankly, the world does not revolve around me and my satisfaction.
I hope that I don’t seek comfort in my life. It seems like that is not only meaningless, but a prescription for pain. Pain to disrupt that elusive comfort and help me to see that there is more to life than me.
Happy Thanksgiving. To Everyone.

Tonight I read about Michael Richards recent performance at a Los Angeles comedy club. I watched him scream a profanity-laced racial tirade at some unsuspecting hecklers in the crowd. It was a sad spectacle of anger to an extreme degree. Today, he has apologized with something like, “I’m not a racist…I’m sorry.” While I do think that we must forgive his gaffe, I don’t actually believe those words just came out. People don’t say those things on a whim; they always need practice.
A few months ago we saw the mug shots of Mel Gibson after he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. His bloodshot eyes and disheveled appearance only touched on the severity of Mel’s foolish behavior. Later we learned that Mel had likewise released a torrent of anti-Semitic speech directed at a police officer. Like Richards, Gibson quickly apologized and said, “I’m not an anti-Semite.” Yet I wonder where this inflammatory speech came from.
Today at work, we were reviewing a small site I had created for some upcoming. I had spent a good part of Friday working on it, and although I wasn’t necessarily pleased with the result, I wasn’t interested in creating a new version. I assumed the short deadline would free me from redoing it. But after discussing how poor the site was, I just sat there and started to stew. I got mad; I got mad at the concept of having to start something again. And so I sat there and stared at the other folks in the room and didn’t say much. Later on, we discussed the situation and assuaged the tense and unnecessary behavior. But I still wonder, where did that anger and laziness come from?
In all of the cases above, the behaviors were neither random nor accidental. They are accidental in the sense that no one would reasonably choose to say or do those things. They are accidental only because we made a poor judgment for a moment and showed our true colors.
Michael Richards didn’t drop racial epithets accidentally. He obviously has included them in his vocabulary, because people don’t simply spew that sort of stuff that easily without practice. He said what he said because he has thought the same things before.
Mel Gibson spoke so badly of the Jews because he has done so before. Maybe he was ranting with his dad, but over the course of his life, that dialog has become part of his life. The things he said don’t just slip when inebriated.
Today, I got angry and defensive because I have those tendencies in my life. I don’t get angry too often, but my actions show that roots of those sins exist in my life. Because the duress showed me who I am when my guard is down, I now know what habits I need to deal with.
When we blow up, get mad or do something stupid, the wrong response is to bury our actions. It would be foolish to say, “That’s just a one-time thing.” The reality is that life’s stressful situations show us more of who we really are than anything else. And since I know who I want to be, I can say, “My actions of today do not correspond with who I want to be. Therefore, I’m going to do X or Y to change my life so that when I’m put in a similar situation, my actions will correspond to my beliefs.”
If only that were an easy thing to do.

Our modern culture plays a huge role in the decline of personal morality led primarily by a continual bombardment with overtly sexual images.
No one would doubt the increasingly lascivious nature of the images produced for movies, television, and advertising. When a beer company promotes their product via a commercial, the beer itself often plays a supporting role. It is the blond woman who “advertises” the beer—not the product itself.
For the first time in human history, the sights and sounds of culture are beamed directly into our homes. We can turn on the radio, watch television or surf the web without moving our chair. It is possible to be completely entertained and nourished without leaving our residences. We can watch whatever we please while we order a pizza.
These images saturate our existence. Unlike the past when most people actually lived with family or with roommates, our culture is migrating toward single living. I live alone do not believe that living alone is inherently wrong. However, I do see it as an inherently more dangerous way of living, but more on that later.
Culture is now completely at our local disposal. We regularly imbibe heinous and slovenly acts through these media. And because we are more likely to live alone, we have created a wickedly fertile ground for sin.
If you were writing an equation it would be something like this:

Media Influx + fertile imagination + time – accountability = BAD

This situation is like a powder keg, waiting for a spark to set it off. Maybe that spark is frustration. Maybe that spark is tiredness. I’m not sure what that spark may be, but because of the environment that we live in, it doesn’t take much to devolve into a continual and spiraling cycle of sin.
It would be wise to consider the environment you have “created” for your life. Have you created a system that is going to break down? Have you created a system that is going to lead you to sin? We all have vestiges in our life that are built on some prideful assumption that we are strong enough to deal with these difficult situations. We have created an institution at odds with the lifestyle outlined by Jesus, and we are foolish to continue believing that this institutional failure won’t cause significant problems as we strive to become better followers of Christ.
Unfiltered personal time aided by the sights and sounds of the media will lead to personal failure if we don’t minimize alone-time while participating in an active and useful accountability system.