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Define “life.”

Define how you enjoy “life.” What do you try to do to enjoy life? Try to feel? Obtain?

Name one thing that, if you had within your power to do so, you would change to improve life.

Thanks!

UPDATE: Okay, so I was a little thrown off by the lack of responses – they’re fairly harmless questions – until my ever-surprisingly-wise girlfriend pointed out how loaded of questions they were.

New rule: just answer off the top of your head. Use a fake name. I don’t care.

“Our best chance at survival is if we all work together as one.”
- General Maximus Decimus Meridius

I confess, when I saw that quote as the signature of someone’s work today, my first thought wasn’t a holy, Christian analogy, but more of something like “Yeah, I used quotes like that in high school.”  You know, I am entitled to think such things since I am totally three whole years removed from high school.

But then I actually used my brain and realized how fitting of a quote it was for Christians. 

Little backstory first …

I grew up in a high school pervaded with rules and students that personified the legalistic Christianity everybody loves to hate, and hate it I did.  I argued constantly with other students and some teachers, convinced my thinking as a charismatic Jesus-lover made me not only smarter than them, but permitted to treat them like such. 

Now, though that concern is gone, I still catch myself degrading Christians for beliefs and thoughts I deem as ignorant or, to be concise, just wrong.  So what if I think they’re wrong?  They think the same of me.  And six billion Chinese people half a world away really don’t care what we think.

I’ve see similar thoughts posted in blogs around the blogosphere, and a harsh fact is descending on my reality, on all our realities …

There are amazing churches and Christians out there, but Christianity itself feels like it is deteriorating.

There are dozens of various theories and solutions to various questions and problems in Christianity and in the world, and how to fight off the world’s attacks and how to get stronger and more manly as Christians and take on the evil of the day. 

Now, I’m definitely nobody to say what’s right or wrong with any of their arguments.  All I can say is that Maximus’s quote backs up stuff God says in the Bible.  There are dozens of references about how much better it is to go at something with someone else instead of doing it alone. 

Where two or three gather, God meets with them.  One person can’t get warm alone, but two people can warm each other.  Ropes bound together cannot break … something like that. 

I doubt it will ever happen, but it’s fun to wonder about what Christians could do on a global scale if they just unified under the single idea that matters – Jesus Christ is Lord of everything – and forgot about how all the other things could separate them.

With that in mind, I’ve contacted an old friend of mine.  We may be starting a new blog based on a book idea we had freshman year.  And, shocker, it could result in a blog change … although hopefully not.

Oh, and Maximus and his gang of gladiator dudes not only survived by banding together, but, as ol’ wallstreet down there points out, changed their world.

Cheesy line, that “changed their world,” but that’s what everybody that cares about anything really wants, right?

• Interviews with people about various aspects of life.  They’ll probably center around the topic of what people think about Jesus, and it’ll be more than cheesy answers.  I hope for the interviews to provide insight into the lives of others, sharing their stories with you and how what they have experienced has shaped their thoughts toward Jesus, Christianity, and the church.  We Christians are awesome at realizing how blind some people are about Jesus, but a lot of times I think we’re just as blind about those people. 
• Researched posts about various “gray” topics in the Bible, such as drinking, smoking, music, sex, sports, politics, tithing, etc.  I’ll compare historical time frames, Biblical translations, original Greek wording, and present the ideas of various Bible-studying folks compared to those of people who might not see the Bible the way Christians do.
• Movie reviews.
• No, I actually will review movies.  And I’ll get various perspectives on it, and I’ll let you see exactly how far my mind can stretch things to incorporate God.  I haven’t really come up with a rating system, though I’ll throw one together by the time I start.
• Book reviews.  Same idea.  Maybe I’ll even get Oprah to comment on here. 
• Now that summer’s coming up I’ll actually have time to read a few books in addition to working and writing these posts. 
• I also have some wild goals about interviewing various celebrities, both in Christian society and pop culture society.  Names that immediately come to mind are Rob Bell (described as the emerging face of today’s Evangelical Christianity here), Donald Miller (author), Donald Trump (why not?), John Stewart, Richard Dawkins (high-profile atheist), George Bush (yeah, the President), Barry Bonds (yeah, the baseball player), and all kinds of people like those. 
• Seriously, I’d like to talk to them.  Where do they find life?  Beyond the riches and fame and Christian authorship success?  (Not that those three were intended to relate to each other.)  What does “life” mean to them?  If you know them, have them email me.

Those more in-depth posts will likely come in a month or so, once finals are over and I get to relax a little bit from school and get to breathe a little bit.

Until then, check out Rob Bell’s NOOMA videos.  You can watch the first one for free at nooma.com, but he charges for the other ones after a two-minute clip. 

Always found it strange that people make money off of talking about God.

Well here, it’s all free.  Enjoy.

What proves it to them?  Doing everything for them they say you can do, or doing for them what means the most to them?

Kinda obviously, the latter of both.

The point of those questions comes from a thought I had inspired by Ted Dekker’s blog, where he talks about screaming at mountains. I’ve done similar things to stir up the declarations of faith in the Bible, but I realized that yelling and screaming and, basically, over-doing it reflects insecurity from myself.

So, likewise to the lover question, screaming at a mountain – or tree – to move or sprinting out over a pool while looking up at God does’t prove faith.  Why would he need us to do that?

He doesn’t need us to move mountains or run on water.  That’s just stuff humans try to do from time to time because it was mentioned in the Bible. I mean, I’ve done it, and every Christian kid I know has tried walking/running on water at some point.

That mountain was most likely metaphorical, and as far as walking on water, well, unless you need to walk to a boatful of disciples in a storm, I doubt it’ll ever be necessary.  God’s not into magic tricks.  Except with Moses, but then, that was to freak out somebody that seriously needed a good freaking out.

Point: God’s faith works in correlation with the necessity of the action in our lives.

And by the way, the talking to mountains thing does work.  Not once has a mountain – or tree – disobeyed when I commanded it to sit still and not move until I come back.

Evolutionists like the “Chimps are 98% human” argument, and it makes sense.  Chimps smile.  They use hands.  They can walk upright and look relatively normal, despite having arms that drag the ground.  They are a prime candidate for possible human descendants. 

But I just read in a book yesterday that to bridge the gap from human DNA to chimp DNA, to go from 98% human to 100% chimp (or for a chimp to go from 98% chimp to 100% human) it would take 60 million base pairs. 

Now, I really don’t even know what a base pair is, but I know that the human genome has 3 billion of them, 2 percent of which is that 60 million. 

What that means is that 60 million things would have to change for a chimpanzee to become a walking, talking, normally-functioning human being.  Even with the 4 billion years we had, according to them, that would be unbelievable, and as evolutionists say, everything evolved from a little bubbling pool of primordial ooze or something, so chimpanzees would have had to come along far after that, and had to go through millions of times more changes that that just to become chimpanzees.

And not only would 60 million things have to change, but they would have to be beneficial changes.  Positive mutations. 

I often feel better suited to deliver pizza – by bicycle – than give people advice in a column, and I just have to be honest, if there wouldn’t be a gaping hole in the sports section this week without this column, I probably would not have written it.

Clearly, some coaches’ emails and voicemails are in an evil conspiracy to keep your kids’ names and stats out of the News sports pages.

So instead of JV baseball or tennis match stories or middle school track meet stats, here’s my best shot at being a self-help sports columnist for a week.

High school athletes, this is for you.

As the overused saying goes, you can have anything if you really want it bad enough and work hard enough to get it.

Working hard is great, but only if you are also working smart.

I arrived to Barton College three years ago a wide-eyed, bewildered, insecure freshman catcher out of a little invisible high school and some days, that little shaggy-headed freshman still pops his obnoxious little head up from time to time – kinda like those old-school smack-the-alligator arcade machines.

In college’s early days, I didn’t know what to do, so I just did everything, and did it above and beyond the expected amount.

Yeah, that definitely backfired. To be sure, I learned a lot. In fact, somewhere in me, I probably know everything there is to know about baseball.

Okay … I lied there.

But I completely quit trusting what ability I had and relied on how things felt in my drills. In scrimmages I couldn’t hit because I was too busy thinking about where my hands needed to go and when my left foot needed to step and what pitch I should be looking for and where I should be hitting the ball.

Same deal happened with catching. I had a strong, accurate arm in high school but quit believing in it because I thought too much about what might be wrong in my throwing form. With blocking, I very rarely had passed balls in high school, but in college, I forgot how to block because I was too worried about doing it all the right way. I even forgot to actually block and started trying to pick everything.

In short, I self-destructed. And I became terrified of everything, to the point of not being able to throw the ball back to the pitcher.

No lie there.

I was freaked out and felt beyond repair. I’ve felt like quitting literally more times than I can count.

These past few months, thank God, I finally snapped out of it, and have actually gotten into the starting lineup. Kinda crazy. Haven’t become an all-American or number one prospect, but I guess you can’t have everything.

What made the difference?

I learned how to relax, I quit overthinking everything, and I began working smarter. Finally.

I quit caring about how dumb I might look or how bad I might play, and quit obsessing over the smallest details of my game.

I quite feeling like I had to play well, had to work hard. When it became a choice rather than a chore, things felt much easier.

No player will be the same as another, and some will be able to get away with working less than others.

Whatever sport you play, trust yourself and your abilities, and just enjoy playing, whether high school and rec leagues are it for you, or if you decide to go on to the next level.

It’s a ton of work and it ain’t easy, and a million people don’t make it pro for every one that does, and wow, it’s frustrating.

But if you want it and love it, it’s worth every second.

And whatever you do, remember, sports are games, and games are meant to be enjoyed.

Dustin Carter, a high school wrestler from Hillsboro, Ohio, made it to the state wrestling championships last year.

Link to YouTube video of him wrestling.  Pretty incredible.

Link to his town’s paper coverage of him (The Cincinnati Enquirer).

Thanks to boingboing.net, where I saw this story. 

“We fear not what we cannot be, but what we can become.”

It is man’s ever-living complex, the fear of self, that so often cripples him. Why do we fear our potential? Fulfilling our potential? Reaching our apex?

At first, in thinking along the lines of my paraphrased version of the thought (which I also mistakenly thought was said by Ghandi), I had a thought add on to it – maybe we fear our potential, being everything we can become, because we fear that everything we can become is not enough.

Enough for what?

For our legacy. Everybody longs to leave a legacy. It is written about, sung about, dreamed about. Everybody wishes to be remembered.

Too often people worry too much about being remembered instead of considering what they may be remembered for. Considering what impression, what footprint, they may leave in another’s life.

Then I looked up the actual quote. Naturally, it was way different from what I originally thought tonight.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

After reading that, I reasoned, well I was wrong about the quote, but right about the secondary thought with it. We fear that our light may not be bright enough to overcome the darkness.

I just had another thought along those lines I took five minutes or so to write down, but now I’m back on track here …

Alright, not a bad thought. I felt pretty good about myself for punching holes in another man’s logic. After all, if God didn’t say it, it will have holes, and one thing I’ve recently been learning about myself is that I really enjoy using humanity’s wisdom as a punching bag.

Maybe I should have gone into law.

So I came home and began writing this blog and decided that I oughta be a true journalist and do a little research on the quote and when Ghandi said it.

Turns out it wasn’t Ghandi, but Marianne Williamson, and the quote was a paragraph, not just three sentences.

Sometimes the punching bag hits back. And I like it. Read the whole quote below, and you’ll see why.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course In Miracles (New York: Harper Collins, 1992)

So, even if we were afraid of not being sufficient when we reach our potential, we now identify that as a lie. I know this isn’t the Bible, but I believe it to be truth, and anything true is something of God.

If we become everything we can be, then we have reached all our potential. Potential we possess, yes, but potential crafted specifically for us individually by an incredible, creative God.

But here’s the kicker, my final thought of the blog: What if, since our Creator is infinite, our potential has no limit?

What if we never reach our potential because it never stops growing?

Miller uses a pancake he cooked for breakfast as a metaphor, and I came up with a more practical one – dogs.

When a dog is a puppy, he is scared to death at first of everything once you become his owner. Of you picking him up, all of that. But he eventually learns to enjoy the ride up.

He learns to understand your tones and the pitches of your voice, but he will never understand exactly what you say – only what you might mean or feel. That is similar to humans with God. God’s voice is far beyond the immature Christian’s understanding. This is why I have not yet heard his audible vocals.

Another comparison is this – a son and his father.

I am 20 years old as I write this and if it’s ever published, I’ll be older by then. But when a kid is born, he doesn’t fully understand anything about his parents. As he grows older, he learns bits and pieces. At first he embraces them, then as often is the pattern, begins to struggle against them in some facet of life. We call this teenagerhood.

Sound familiar? In life and in Christianity?

Many Christians get stuck in Christian teenagerhood. I don’t know if I’m even fully into Christian puberty yet, but I’ve had my share of struggles with my heavenly dad.

But the older I have gotten as a son, the more I have come to understand the dad God born me to. There are two dominant positive flaws to being a Sneed – we love too much and we care too much, about whatever we are involved in. Sports, girls, jobs, you get the idea.

Then there are two dominant negative flaws – our tempers and our nerves. We can get incredibly ticked off about something to the point of punching holes in doors (only to come back and apologize later due to Flaw 1 and 2), while at the same time, we get so nervous about things that we function more like drugged lab rats than stable human beings. My dad can’t speak in front of people without having prepared for hours on end the week before. I couldn’t throw a ball back to the pitcher in college, as a catcher, for two years. No lie.

The point of all that is to say this – the older I became, the less I got aggravated with my dad and the more I understood him, because I began to understand myself more, and I began to realize how much like him I actually was.

As people relating to God, the more we grow in him, the more we grow as people because we discover parts of him that are also in us.

Why do you think so much of Hollywood loves dynamic lines about people finding strength in themselves or something like that?

Because God has put traits of himself in us as human beings. And yes, we don’t always need him to discover those traits. But … BUT! … the more we get to know him, the more it releases – or even unleashes – those traits in our lives, taking them and making them more than they could ever be if we did it alone.