I was tagged for confession a week or so ago by Christine Sine. The instructions for the meme are:

1. Apologize for three things that Christians have often got wrong. Your apologies should be directed towards those who don’t view themselves as part of the Christian community. Alternatively, apologize for things you personally have done wrong towards those outside of the church.
2. Post a comment at the originating post so others can keep track of the apologies.
3. Tag five people to participate in the meme.
4. If desired, send an email with the link to your blog post at the Christians Confess site, giving permission for your apologies to be added to the website.

This is not an easy process (as I state in the third one). Perhaps most difficult has been narrowing it down to these three! Each of these could be a series of blog entries, but I hope I have boiled each down to a sentence or two that will suffice:

• I confess that we have spent too much time and energy being concerned about what is going to happen beyond this physical reality. Christians often get so fixated on what is in store in some kind of other world eternity that we lose sight of what it means to be a follower of Jesus in the physical present.
• I confess that we have not given women their proper voice as a result of some poor Biblical intrepretation throughout our history and in the present.
• I confess that it is easy for me to see all the ways Christians have been wrong in how they have interacted with outsiders while ignoring the reality that I have probably been guilty of everyone of them at some point. It is painful to think of the possible things I could write because I don’t want to even allow them to be identified with the Christian faith that I want to be a part of — yet I know that most of these things have been present in my own faith expression at times.

Tag…you’re it!
Eugene Cho
Meredith Dancause
Mike DeVries
Jamie Mulhern
Ken Nussbaum

Todd Hiestand tagged me. I’m going to play along, not only because I like Todd, but also because I want to encourage him to keep blogging so I can read about fascinating things like his hair growing.

This is the first photo in our iPhoto library (I say ‘our’, because we keep all the photos on my wife’s computer, so I guess I mildly cheated):

This was taken when my nephew was born with an old school Sony digital camera. I think the max resolution it could take was 640×480.

‘Our’ iPhoto Stats:
# of pics: 11,881 (yikes!)
Date of first pic: 12/9/1998

I tag:

• JJ Peterson
• Zach Lind (Aperture also counts Zach)
• Josh Longbrake
• Josh Klocke
• Todd Hiestand (just testing to see if an infinite tag loop will crash the internet)

(I’ve also been tagged by Christine Sine, and that post is coming…it just requires a little more effort.)

Zach has tagged me with a meme of the Perfect Song. Here’s the rules:

1. scan through your itunes or cd library. refamiliarize yourself with the nooks and crannies of your musical options.
2. identify five categories — genres, if you will — of music. these should be as obscure and finely-articulated as you’d like. feel free to use modifiers liberally.
3. nominate — select, really — a “perfect song” for each category. include a link for each song to something (the amazon page for the CD, or the artist’s website, or whatever). you may find it easier, as i did, to find “perfect songs”, and craft categories or genres around them.
4. ideally, some of the songs will be nominally obscure, or, at least, not completely mainstream and overplayed. no need to tell us all about songs we all know!

So…let’s get on with it. I give you the perfect song for…

…feeling either rebellious or guilty for delighting in a song that many might not think is appropriate for me to like — We Looked Like Giants, Death Cab for Cutie

…driving through open terrain on a rainy day while entertaining dreams and hopes of a beautiful future — First Breath After Coma, Explosions in the Sky

…remembering that I am loved for who I am, not for what I’ve done — Song of the Harlot, The Violet Burning

…playing something really loud to fill your ears with sonic goodness — Quiet, Smashing Pumpkins

…for softly singing (er, stumbling through) in my daughter’s ear while swaying her to sleep at night — Talk of the Town, Jack Johnson & Kawika Kahiapo

And to move it along, I tag:

Mike DeVries
Josh Longbrake
Ken Nussbaum
JJ Peterson (I fear that JJ’s list might include at least one Philips, Craig & Dean song, but he never makes it past the first paragraph of my blog anyway.)