My Favorite Father's Day Video of 2013

From the Skit Guys.

Friday Fun: Iron Man 3/Man of Steel parody

This is from HISHE.com. Why does Superman lose the red outerwear for this reboot? Hoping to see Man of Steel sometime soon.

Have a Happy Father's Day weekend!

Parable Worship

Here's a song based in a parable that isn't inherently meant for children's ministries, but for a general corporate worship service.

It's sung by Sandra McCracken and entitled "Come to the Feast," based in Christ's Parable of The Great Banquet (Luke 14:16-24).

You can read more about it (and listen to it, of course!) here.

What We Learned from “The Office”: Pt. 3

Religion (and a Lot Else) is Misunderstood

It was going to be a big party with my friends to watch the Season 4 premiere. I had just gotten married and my wife and I had just moved for grad school and found a new group of friends and fellow Office fans. And the Season 3 finale really left us wondering if Jim and Pam were finally getting together. But we were a bit worried, because the preview synopsis indicated that there’d be a tour of all the characters’ respective religions. In our hopes to have a laughing good time like we had come to expect, might we be encountering some sad sacrilege instead?

Turns out, not at all. There wasn’t much talk, positive of negative, about religion. So it remained misunderstood. Such is a sad reality of our culture that it reflects.

Up until that episode, the only appearance of religion was in the character of Angela, a caricature of uber-conservative  Christianity, most similar to a first century Pharisee. Likely from a somewhat Amish background, Angela mostly wore clothes made for life-size colonial dolls and vehemently disavowed most forms of pop culture and general happiness. Her seeming cold and heartless (and hypocritical) personality maintained a front against all hostile and gracious attempts against it (save for her dozens of cats) until her short-changing and scandalous  divorce from the state senator broke her, and she warned Andy Bernard to not “let pride destroy his life.”   

Toby was a seminary dropout who rushed into a marriage that ended in a messy divorce. Occasionally, you see patience and grace in his role in Human Resources and the handling/counseling of Michael’s issues and his personally insulting and oppressive behavior. However, Toby struggled for years to forgive his ex-wife (and God, who doesn’t deserve the blame), and we slowly see the pent-up bitterness spill out as melancholy resignation. I’ve met a few Tobys in my life.

Stanley Hudson is a twice-divorced unbelieving Catholic. Kelly Kapoor comes from a Hindu family and worships the shallowest parts of pop culture. Phyllis Vance is a nominal Lutheran who married a Unitarian. Oscar Martinez refrained from saying “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and, more than likely, disagrees with most churches’ stances on politics and sexuality.

Aside from these occasional and random caricatures and mentions of religion, the biggest interaction happens when Jim and Pam (also nominal Christians, at best) have their daughter get christened, likely in Pam’s childhood church. The entire office attends the Sunday morning service at the traditional and liturgical sanctuary, and gets accidentally invited (along with the rest of the attending congregation) to Jim and Pam’s families’ private reception.  The office workers meet a group of congregants about to head off to an impoverished part of Mexico to build a school. It’s in this experience where we see each character interact with the notion of a church and its mission.

The idea of a Mexico missions trip seems very implausible, to say the least, to the office workers. Ryan mocks their abstinence from alcohol, and Kevin and Stanley are only frustrated about the food they haven’t been able to eat, due to the unexpected guests. Michael wants to see similar community and charity in the office and chides his workers for their mockery. He and Andy then want to join the community and its charitable mission to Mexico and hop on the bus, but both realize quickly they can’t make that type of disciplined self-sacrifice.

That episode seemingly showed the Truth, teachings, community, charity and even flaws of the Church in a sad-but-accurate implausible light, but it also seemed to purposely show the sad reality of the ethnocentricism, narrow-mindedness, materialism and self-centeredness pervasive in a culture that struggles to understand or accept the Church. As the culture and Church continue to grow apart while living together, impractical tensions and unnecessary scuffles can be prevented with more honest, humble and gracious conversation. Sadly, we don’t see that much in The Office, also when it comes to issues of race, sexuality, politics, culture, etc.

And that’s sadly because we don’t see such honest, humble and gracious conversations that much in society. There ought to be more gentle talk and less angry yelling, or else Michael Scott’s level of knowledge and wisdom when it comes to very common personal issues will likely become the norm. 

Next (and Lastly): All Relationships Can End in Grace       

Prayer is Sacred Communication, Not a Weapon of Spite

Some thoughts here from Joe Carter regarding the graduation speech at Liberty High School.

"Christians in America are justifiably frustrated by attempts to restrict our religious liberties. We should guard such freedoms carefully and oppose unnecessary infringement on religious speech. But there is a proper time, place, method, and motivation for such actions. We should consider our own motivations for supporting such prayers and ask ourselves some hard questions. What message does it send when we applaud a young man for defying legitimate authorities by citing our Lord's model prayer at a graduation ceremony? Does it show others that we want to honor God or is it just another way to show our disdain for our culture war adversaries? Perhaps it would be better to give up public prayers altogether if all they have become is a form of irreverent protest."

You can read the rest here. Thoughts?

Friday Fun: Batman the Soundman

No lie. This cartoon is posted in our gym's sound booth.

I'm normally not one to jump on a meme bandwagon, but this was too witty.

Shout-out to sound board operators for worship services!

Have a great weekend!

What We Learned from "The Office": Pt. 2

“He really respected the manager.” Michael Scott spoke this of his stepfather Jeff when they went to a baseball game and the manager of the team they were cheering for, controversially, took the pitcher off the mound. Michael recalled this during a counseling session with Toby. Upon hearing this story, Toby thought he might have learned a bit about Michael’s background and his need to be in leadership and to be liked.

What’s ironic is that Michael Scott, the Scranton’s Regional Manager for Dunder Mifflin Paper Co., from a business perspective, is a horrible manager. Much of the humor in the entire series’s storyline comes from how Michael Scott allows (or even directly causes) so much (sometimes fire-able) unprofessionalism, distraction and counter-productivity to occur in his office branch due to irrelevant issues in his or another’s personal life. There’s occasionally some bright spots, but Michael Scott’s overall administrative and relationship leadership skills are atrocious. Likely promoted from salesman as a reward for landing a key client, manager Michael Scott is quite unmanageable. It was mostly his subordinates (e.g. Pam, Jim, Toby, etc.) who had to step up and keep the emotional and business functionality of the office intact. One could make the argument, however, that Michael had matured into a more capable manager by the time he was about to leave the company.

So, the best management seen in the series was by those who best managed the unmanageable Michael Scott, whether from corporate or his own subordinates. (Even though the position of Michael’s direct supervisor had more turnover than Hogwarts’ Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts in Harry Potter). Because, despite his lack of administrative skills and overall professionalism, his sales ability (and especially his connections in Scranton) are unprecedented and seemingly vital to the whole company’s well-being.   

Jan Levinson, Michael’s first direct supervisor in the series, realized his sales ability after he landed the government of all of Lackawanna County as the company’s new client. She was a more gracious superior to Michael’s antics, but the repressed issues of her personal life eventually cost her her job. Ryan Howard, the young pseudo-salesman with an MBA who became her surprising successor, tried to enforce (almost with a vendetta) more professionalism and productivity in the branch, along with many unwanted methodical changes across the board. The failure and scandal of his project, the new company website, resulted in his termination. Then Charles Miner, from Saticoy Steel, came into the office like an impersonal and ignorant drill sergeant, not acknowledging/utilizing the employees‘ various strengths and weakness and offending Michael out of the company, after which he started his own paper supplier business, vengefully utilizing his knowledge of his now ex-employer and his connections in Scranton to steal many clients. David Wallace, a newer CFO for Dunder Mifflin, had several periods for supervising Michael while his direct supervisor position was vacant. Later, when Dunder Mifflin was purchased by Sabre, its Founder/CEO Jo Bennett and branch liaison Gabe Lewis seemed to have good balanced leadership to let Michael do what he does best: train the sales team, and get out of the way of everything else.

So, whoever best managed Michael Scott saw the most profit and business success, and that very much required the gifts of grace and maximization to best utilize the diverse gifts from a diverse group of people, selling paper to a diverse group of clients in diverse places.

Such grace and maximization is rare good management, and it’s key to success. It reminds me about Paul’s illustration of the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-26). Why try to make an eye do what an ear does? Why try to live without a sense of smell? 

We ought to see such grace and maximization more in business, church and even family leadership.

Next: Religion (and a Lot Else) is Misunderstood