Marker: Hand someone a 20 dollar bill at a store and more often than not they whip out one of those counterfeit identifier pens and put a mark on the bill you just handed them. As they make the mark I always hold my breath and feel like a criminal. I've never counterfeited a bill in my life and only, during the lean years, have I even entertained the thought. But send me to a grocery store with a 20 and I feel like an instant criminal. What if the mark deems my bill fake what do I do. Do I go to jail? Get invested by the Secret Service? Basically what I concluded is that I'm out $20 bucks. But then this leads to multiple other thoughts. Why do I get stuck with the bad $20? What about the person I got it from? So in the end for peace of mind I now carry around a countefeit pen and when cashiers hand me money a put a nice little mark on the money and if it turns black...they're busted! I'm calling the cops of them. Citizens On Patrol!

Counterfeit: While on vacation to Mexico I was able to reread two books that made a huge impact when I first read them. The first I read was Through Painted Deserts by Donald Miller. I originally read this book in August 2005 as I began to wrap up ministry at Emmanuel where I was a youth pastor. He talks about the adventure of life and the beauty of leaving home so you can one day return to it. It was an interesting analogy because I was about to return to the home of my youth. The second book I read was Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I cracked it open in the airport of Acapulco and by the time we boarded the plane in Atlanta I had 20 short pages to left and was able to finish the book in one travel day. I think that book is best read that way and I was so happy to revisit so many truths that shook my thinking those years ago but removed what seemed to be spiritual scales that were covering my eyes to truth of the universe as well as truth of Christ and his Bride, the church.

I began this thought sometime in our travels home last week and I'll finish it here: The heart, the mind, the whatever you want to call it that sees beauty and feels beauty is created by God. I suppose if we wanted we could reduce it to science and explain that when we see something beautiful like a sunset or a woman a chemical washes over our brains and this stimulation is why beauty is so amazing...but why would be do that? There's no romance in science. "You know baby, as we sit here and gaze at this sunset and as I gaze at your beautiful face I feel the chemicals wash over my brain and...ME LIKEY! So let's make out. Is your brain doing the same thing?"

God created us to experience beauty both the emotion of it as well as the euphoric feeling of it. This is a God given thing and I believe an experience that ultimately draws us into relationship with him. The problem comes when like everything else we begin to meddle and discover we can make a counterfeit experience for ourselves rather than being give and take we can make it all take. As the serpents voice echoes "go ahead and take the fruit and shortcut this relationship with God. If you bite you don't need his wisdom of good and evil you'll know it all-shortcut-shortcut" So we take the shortcut and we meddle and we discover than rather than enjoy a womans beauty in the way God created we experience casual sex or pornography or masturbation (oh crap did he just say the "M" word?) and we shortcut. We create this counterfeit experience that is neither right morally or experientally nor is it how God intended it and with this shortcut comes the briars and the thorns and the scrapes and the scars and the PAIN. Rather than experience the sun and the moon and the trees and the stars as beauty and let the romance and the chemicals wash over our brains we smoke crack and shoot heroin and shortcut and with the shortcut comes the briars and the thorns and the scapes and the PAIN.

Maybe those are two very extreme examples but let that idea trickle down and how often do we shortcut something that God intended and how often to we experience the result of pain? I feel compelled and convicted to stop shortcutting, maybe I've taken care of the "big things" but not the "smaller things" because afterall what good is a counterfeit experience...it's just counterfeit and painful.