down with authority?

“Everyone must submit himself to governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.” Romans 13

Three reasons I have a hard time believing this:

1. Jesus rebelled against the “authorities” of his day.
2. Paul was writing this about Rome! They had set themselves up as god and were persecuting and killing God’s people. How in the world could Paul have said that in his context?
3. History – Hitler, Stalin, etc. Should the German Christians have submitted to Hitler and killed Jewish people? Or should they have rebelled?

It seems to come down to this question: What is meant by authorities?

Are authorities the ideas that guide us to live with one another without killing everyone? Ideas like freedom of speech, right to own land, right to bear arms, laws not to kill, or steal?

Or

Are the authorities Paul is talking about the people that exist that govern nations such as the Caesar of their time, President Bush, the crazy dude in North Korea, Congressmen and women etc.? This I would have a harder time buying.

Is he talking just about governmental authorities or does this spread to other kind of authority figures as well? Religious authorities such as priests and pastors who seldom agree? How do you follow two religious authority figures that are in disagreement all of the time? How do you follow political authorities who are in disagreement all of the time?

Who counts as an authority figure that God has instituted and who doesn’t? How do we decide?

But then of course can’t people instituted with the authority of God be wrong at times?

Do we follow authority even when we know they’re wrong?

i'm excited about....

Talladega Nights coming out....

Playing in a poker tournament and playing golf this week (both of which I do very poorly)....

The Cubs sweeping the Cardinals in a four game series.....

The last of my LCC friends getting married.....

Flying out to Seattle to do a wedding in a week.....

Hanging out in Temple Square in Salt Lake City on our way to Portland.....

Seeing my family in Morton.....

Getting to start Body Piercing Saved My Life soon.....

Not having an actual place of residence but just traveling around and staying with people......

Getting to spend a bachelor week with my friends from school......

So much to be excited about right now! Life is good!

John Steinbeck is Killing Me

I've been a Steinbeck fan ever since I read East of Eden in 2002 (no, it had nothing to do with Oprah, I had been eyeballing it ever since I worked with Leslie Starasta's crazy ass in the LCC library). I knew after that I would most likely read much much more which I have in the last four years including a few more faves The Winter of Our Discontent, The Pearl (you can read this in one setting and will be a better person for it) Of Mice and Men, and the Grapes of Wrath (probably my least favorite). I still have a few left to read and am currently working on To A God Unknown. The problem is, it is moving so slow that I just want to quit. It's a relatively short book but I can't seem to catch my stride.

The land has always been an important theme to Steinbeck as many of you know and in his context that makes sense but in this book I feel like I am going to die if i have to read any more details about the land. The premise of the story is fascinating, a young man named Joseph gets his fathers blessing to go out west to get his own land and a wife, his father promises that after he dies he will be there with him, Joseph acquires his land and his father dies and for some reason or another Joseph thinks that his father is in the huge oak tree right by his house and is blessing the land. One of his brothers gets worried about Joseph's pagan beliefs and kills the tree and a plague falls on the land. Unfortunately I'm 1/3 of the way through and we're still describing the land. I just want to get to the story already!

What do you do when you are in the middle of a book that you really want to finish but you can't bear to pick up? I can't just quit, right?

I've purchased Body Piercing Saved My Life (by recommendation of Gentry) and I really want to just chuck everything and read that but I also want to save it for the plane ride to Seattle in a few weeks. Quite a dilemma.

I'm also thinking about reading some current fiction for a time just for a change of pace and some freshness. The problem is, I know the classic authors very well but i don't know anything about current writers or what they are writing about. Anyone have some recommendations they would like to give of something that came out recently?

By the way, I apologize for the whiny, self-involved blog post. I'm bored.

Another by the way, the Cubs are beating the Cardinals AGAIN. I love the fact that the Cardinals cannot find a way to beat the horrible Cubs. Freaking hilarious.

brush with death

We went over to a family member of Kelli's to walk the dogs and check the place out since it is new and I almost was attacked. I love boxers and have actually never met a bad boxer, until just a few minutes ago. This boxer was a big boy named Duke. I had no idea he was a vicious killer. there was apparently something about me he didn't like. I bent down to pet him and he almost ripped my arm off. After that he wouldn't stop barking at me. Everytime I would move he would come towards me and start barking as if he was ready to strike. I almost wet my pants. Kelli's Dad was trying to get him away from me but it was hard to pry him off. It was soon after that they told me he has already bit 4 people! 4 people! And they haven't put him to sleep yet. I wanted to volunteer to do it myself. Boxers aren't supposed to be like that!

ode to the small town

Kelli and I have been hanging in Marshall, Illinois for the last few days and it has been a nice change of pace. When you grow up in a small town, nothing feels more comfortable than a small town. If there is ever a time when the cities get extremely overpopulated and miserable I know I can always count on being able to move to the middle of nowhere and find some peace. Granted, that will probably not happen for a while but it's nice to know there is a place where you can set on a front porch in the warm summer breeze blowing in the huge trees and watch the cars go by while waving to those you know and sometimes those you don't. We ate homemade fried chicken and mashed potatoes last night, sat out on the porch for a few hours with grandma and then played Euchre and drank sweet tea until bedtime. Can life get any better?

Some Music Recommendations

The Lancaster Orchestra - With Help From Absent Friends

--Newfound Friends




Lisa Germano - In The Maybe World

--Excerpts From a Love Circus









Ian Love - Ian Love

--The Only Night




Adam Arcuragi - Adam Arcuragi

--The Christmas Song




Pinetop Seven - Beneath Confederate Lake

--Paramour
--Quit These Hills



All of these albums can be found on www.emusic.com. I've been using this subscription service for about 5 months now and love it. You can find all kinds of new music and you get 40 songs a month for just 9.95. That's a pretty sweet deal. If you sing up I believe you get 25 free songs or something. If you do end up signing up for this please give me the reference so I can get some free songs as well. Just type in my email dbagby@gmail.com as the referall and I will love you forever!

left and leaving

I'm updating today because I have been called out by Betsy for being a slacker. I've been meaning to for a while but things have been insane trying to get ready to leave for Portland.

We spent our last weekend in Tampa in very busy fashion. I had three friends from high school visit the last four days and we had a great time. Went to the beach, jet skied, played poker, lots of Mariokart for N64 (i know it's pathetic), and had some great rum runners.

Last Sunday was indeed our last Sunday at Journey. We are doing a series in Romans and I preached Romans 8 starting in vs. 28. Pretty awesome part of the letter. Sean and the band played the Nada Surf song Always Love and did AMAZING. Sounded perfect. We are going to miss everyone down here. We've got a lot of history with Journey and they have heard me preach some pretty bad sermons and still liked me anyway. I appreciate that!

John and Taryn took us out to Outback before we left and gave us an awesome gift from Impact. Thanks guys, we will miss you a lot. It was sad to leave but Tuesday morning we took off and drove to Knoxville pulling a 6 X 12 (enormous) trailer behind us. We had to get rid of a ton of our stuff but it is pretty nice to not be burdened with lots of stuff. It sucks driving a trailer, the drive takes lots longer than it should. Anyway, we enjoyed spending time with my sister Sarah and Jeff, and their children Lindsey, and the twins Ava and Aiden, the cutest children in the world.

The next day we drove to Marshall, Illinois where we are staying with kelli's parents for the week and then we'll be driving up to Chicago to hang out with my friend Brad before he gets married. I'm very excited for him and can't wait to be up there. Then we'll go to my parents in Morton and then I've got to do a wedding in Seattle and then we'll fly home and start the long drive to Portland. It's going to be a very challenging drive with the trailer and I pray that we will be safe. Feel free to send a word up to God on our behalf as well anytime you would like. We're not the best haulers in the world!

I have been checking out all of the amazing shows in Portland. In October Sufjan, Nada Surf, the Decemberists will all be playing on top of every other band I love. The music scene there is ridiculous, i can't wait!

Well Betsy, there is your update. I hope you're happy for now. I will have more soon now that we're chilling for a while. I'm hoping that no one has deleted me from their blog roll yet but who knows.

By the way, if anyone can name the artist that had an album by the same name of this title without looking it up on Amazon, well, i'll be impressed. Can't think of a good prize. Don't cheat, cheaters.

Hotel Lights

How did I miss this? How did I not hear anyone talk about this album back when it came out in March? Darren Jessee is the founder of Hotel Lights. If you don't remember who Darren is, which I didn't, he played drums in Ben Folds Five which is what interested me in giving it a listen. Some albums you know you are going to love right when you hear 10 seconds of the first song. This is one of those records. I listened to a few samples on www.emusic.com and instantly spent my remaining 13 songs on it. His voice reminds me of a mix between Jeff Buckley and Fran Healy (lead singer of Travis). The melodies are very rich and he combines his acoustic sounds with plenty of piano and some cool loops. It is an album I think I could listen to everyday. YOU WANT TO CHECK THIS OUT!

CLICK TO LISTEN:
You Come and Go
Follow Through

True Grapes of Wrath

It doesn't get much funnier than this. My favorite part is the reporters in the studio. Thanks Johnny! You're the man for finding this one!

Lark News

Lark News was on the XXX Church podcast this week and Joel, the guy who created Lark News was on it so I went back to www.larknews.com and cruised some archives and found my new favorite story. This is great!

License plate mistake a headache for Christian motorist

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — Sally Warner, 43, became a Christian while reading the biblical book of Titus. A week later she submitted a form to the DMV requesting a personalized license plate. But her request for a plate reading "TITUS 4U" arrived at her home reading "TITS 4U."
"I was crushed," Warner says. "I couldn't bring myself to put them on my car. The DMV people have been very sympathetic, but they insist I use these plates until new ones arrive."
Warner, a nurse, owns one car and has to drive to work every day. Now other motorists honk at her on the highway, and men make rude "breast-squeezing" gestures, she says, "and not just truckers." She often finds notes with phone numbers left on her windshield.
"All I can think is, 'This is what I get for trying to share the best thing that ever happened to me?'" Warner told a reporter through tears.
The DMV says they are expediting Warner's request, and that there may be an upside to the unfortunate episode.
"Her plate may actually be a collector's item," said a DMV spokeswoman. "We're not allowed to put certain words on license plates and 'tits' is certainly one of them. We're puzzled how this happened." •

My niece and nephew

Say hello to Ava and Aiden! I got a chance to hang out with them at a Cracker Barrell in Tennessee.

Midway Favorites

2006 is halfway over so I figure thsi calls for my favorite albums of this year (I'm bored). This isn't just a monologue however. Let me know what you've enjoyed this year!


Ben Harper - Both Sides of the Gun





Rocky Votolato - Makers






Band Of Horses - Everything All Of The Time






Centro-Matic - Fort Recovery






Josh Ritter - The Animal Years






Shearwater - Palo Santo






Elf Power - Back to the Web






Josh Rouse - Subtitulo






Syd Matters - Syd Matters






Snow Patrol - Eyes Open






Albums I did not find in time to be part of my 2005 list:


Page France - Hello, Dear Wind





Great Lake Swimmers - Bodies and Minds






South San Gabriel - The Carlton Chronicles

What's wrong with this page?

Go ahead and give this a click and see if you see anything strange. I think this was intentional. If not, it certainly is ironic.

UPDATE: I think i miscommunicated, the problem is not the picture itself but something else.

Amazon is a Friend of Emergent

Who ripped off who?????

New Pete Yorn

On August 29th Pete Yorn has a new album out called Nightcrawler. Click here to check out a new song Go With It. It has more layers than his older stuff and I really dig the sound. I loved Musicforthemorningafter. I think I listened to that album about 6,743 times but didn't really care for The Day I Forgot. I think the song Burrito warrants hating that album all by itself. Stupid song. I am much more hopeful that this album will be good.

Good June Reads

The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
I finally finished the mother of all books! This is a book you have to read at least once in your lifetime so I feel pretty good about finishing it off. The first 350 pages was interesting but pretty difficult with many long monologues (good ones however) and lots of eccentric characters which seem to define Russian literature. But once you got past the first half of the book things really pick up and you are hooked until the end. This book is worth it if for nothing else than Father Zossima's teaching, Ivan’s discussion with the Devil or the speeches by the lawyers at the end.

I was telling Kelli yesterday as we were looking at the enormous volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (which we will also read someday far far in the future) that it seems like Russian authors try to cover every aspect of life in their novels. Greed, lust, jealousy, murder, redemption, hope, any freaking subject you can think of they feel like they have to cover. I’m not complaining, it does make for a pretty amazing novel. Sometimes when the long monologues were dragging a little I had to remind myself that someone actually was able to write all of this! Dostoevsky was able to develop and keep up the characters of about 20 different people with perfection. Absolutely amazing! There were many times when I stopped reading this book and thought about it the rest of the day in absolute awe of such a gift that Dostoevsky had. I think I will always be in awe of him. I can’t imagine having been given this kind of imagination or writing skill. I can only attribute like this to God. I’m excited to read Crime and Punishment and The Idiot when I get a chance as well as Dostoevsky’s recreated account of when he spent four years in a Siberian prison. I highly recommend reading this.



















Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
Chris McCandless, a 24 year old college graduate from Emory University disowned his family and made his way out west to travel the countryside by foot and ultimately to try to survive out in the bush of Alaska with a 10 pound bag of rice and minimal supplies. Ultimately, he doesn't make it as many of you already know. No need to say more, Jon Krakauer is awesome and this is a must read. Krakauer does a great job of examining Chris' motives for doing this and giving a detailed account of what led up to this and what went wrong with his plan which he gets straight from McCandless' own journals.




















Pornified – Pamela Paul
This is a fascinating expose of the effects of pornography on our culture and on men and women in general. For this book she interviewed well over 100 people for their experiences or their significant others experience with pornography to examine how it affected relationships as well as a man’s view of women, etc. All the typical stuff but very well done. It is an interesting read but it is very candid so keep that in mind if you are going to read it. Some xxx language in there. I think the first 100 pages started out very strong and had some valuable information but it got pretty redundant in the last 150 pages. The people’s stories got kind of old and redundant as well. It is a tiring book to read but I definitely suggest reading the first 100 pages to really get a glimpse of what pornography has done to the American culture. It’s not an easy book to check out in the library seeing that there is a red, white, and blue thong hanging out on a clothesline. It’s much easier to order it on Amazon!

The Secret Message of Jesus – Brian Mclaren
Click here for previous review.

Jesus of Suburbia – Mike Erre
Click here for previous review.

Back From CIY

I returned from CIY on Saturday evening after a long day of being on the road. It's about 12 hours from Johnson City, TN to Tampa, FL. The students that went with us this week were great. I really enjoyed getting to know the guys and goofing off. It reminded me of what it's like being in High School. There were several hilarious, stereotypical CIY moments such as guys carrying around their guitars trying to impress the girls, which Christian College could get to the vans that were arriving to pray for them first, the amount of cheesy Christian T-Shirts, how many David Crowder songs the band "Foundation Red" covered during the week, the fact that the worship band was called "Foundation Red", or that they sang a song with this first verse:

"I'm finding myself
at a loss for words
and the funny thing is,
it's okay."

I could have sworn it was an REO Speedwagon cover but it was actually indeed a worship song.

I could go on and on. It was very funny but it was a great week to relax, get away from everything and just think for a bit without being distracted by a computer or anything else. The two highlights from the week for me was hearing Craig Gross from XXX Church speak and Kevin Greer from CIY who has been doing ministry for 20 years. They were both very encouraging for what God is doing in our world. It was also a good reminder that God has not created me to be a youth minister. I need that reminder once in a while.