procastinating about movies

trying to overcome my habit of procastinating. I’ve realized that I have a wonderful combination of contemplativeness, indecisiveness, and passiveness at work in my life. This makes it challenging to get things done. First I have about 5 really, really good ideas of what I want to be doing with my life right now. Which one should I pursue first? Next, I have all this concern of using my life to serve God, and I don’t want to choose something that will limit my ability to serve. Then I have all these responsibilities to help my family. In addition, we are a pretty dysfunctional family so it makes it difficult to know if I’m doing enough or if I’m doing too much. The challenge for me is to understand myself, and yet refuse to make excuses.

Next issue is community. More and more I realize the importance of deep friendships and community. But although it’s easy to make friends, it is not that easy to get to a place where you can encourage and challenge each other. And yet that’s what we need to grow. In a strange way, having many friends can be a barrier to real growth. You get so busy having fun, hanging out, doing stuff, but when do you time to really ask- how are you doing? What’s going on with you? I have some amazing friendships, but I realize I don’t have enough depth in some of them. How do you go deeper? Please write me and let me know. Oh yeah, I’m pretty involved in church and small group. So I know lots of people, but these are the very relationships that I want to have more substance in.

So last weekend this movie opened in lots of theatres. Some “Christian leaders” made a big deal about it. I just look at them and wonder- when will they get it? “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, … but against powers, … against spiritual wickedness in high places”. Every time a movie comes out that has a dark side or an anti Christian message, they rally round and issue statements in the press. They seem to be warning us to protect children or they might be tricked. This really annoys me. I feel like they are not acknowledging God’s power, and they are fighting the battle in a very ineffective and irrelevant manner. I think it would be far more useful to try to fund and support christian authors, and produce quality films. (Like try to have christian film schools and MFA programs and stuff- not that it would exclude nonbelievers but that the christian agenda would be encouraged) If we put stuff out there that is entertaining and positive people will buy it. The problem is we create such little quality entertainment and run around attacking Hollywood. For people who haven’t seen the light, pleasure is their god. Oh yeah, and when Hollywood does tell good stories, - like about Jim Eliot- they find offense. With the Jim Eliot movie, the complaint was that the actor was gay. I was like so? I’m sure many actors do things I don’t agree with. That’s not the point. The point is Hollywood is making a movie about a MISSIONARY. Make it a blockbuster so people will go see it and wonder, wow what motivated this guy to live this way? Maybe if the movie did really