The Social Network Epidemic

The Social Network Epidemic

Recently I rented the movie the Social Network. And man was it informative. How amazing that this guy did all this and revolutionized almost all of our communication means. But what I found completely hilarious and ironic is that the guy who invented THE ULTIMATE SOCIAL NETWORK is the most socially inept person on the planet. Just an observation.

It is said that the greatest thing a man can do is create an image. And the second greatest thing a man can do is destroy an image. What is that we as a church want …do we concern our selves with the image we want to create or the issues that God has ordained and called us to solve? I think that social media is great at creating awareness of a certain cause or agenda but it does very little to solve it. This mentality is transferring over into our real lives. And in the process of missing opportunity to solve our problems we are surrendering the solutions to people who have no ability to relate to our plight. We have a group of people 10% of the population who have never had to fight in a war. Who have never had to stand in a food line our use food stamps or state health insurance making fiscal decisions and passing laws that will never ever be subject to them.  And its not their fault we have passed the buck to the point where the rights of our forefathers and grandparents and parents are no longer our rights.  This is not an indictment of our government I am not hear to plead the case of the left or the right. But I am saying this issue is present in the body of Christ as well. How many Church fellowships operate as social group and not as a living member of a body larger then itself? This weekend I met a group of teenagers on fire for Christ. They live in a densely populated area and they are witnessing the social issues that exists even right here in Phoenix. They came here to do an outreach. Why ? Not because there isn’t outreach to be done in their town but as one young person put it …but because their church is against it. Their church is not wanting to reach out to the less fortunate they are not wanting to fight the spiritual warfare that comes with ministering to poverty stricken people.  And there is a huge misconception that prevails that poverty actually has anything to do with finances. Poverty is a spiritual disease that causes economic hardship. I will define poverty at that end of this entry. Poverty is a generational curse…usually accompanied by low morals like sex out of wedlock…abortion….drug use…. And homosexuality…what results is a high crime rate in those areas. which explains the economic disparity of people in prison. Which explains the racial inequality of incarcerated individuals. In most cases. And explains the reason the natural fathers are being written out of our family trees.  Our government has us dooped that the band aid is the solution or the cure. Because the job our government and leaders have undertaken is to create dependency. And to eliminate the ability to actually be self sufficient and prosperous. Like Poverty Prosperity is too a spiritual condition.  How does a person bridge the gap…look I can’t speak for anyone but me. But I will say this Its in my heart. Its not just head knowledge at this point.  My mentality is the only thing stopping me from reaching my goals dreams and desires. BE YE TRANSFORMED not by changing location not by getting a different job or trading this wife in for a newer model…but BY THE WORD OF GOD!!!! Knowing is not enough….going to Church is not enough……

The indictment of the Church as a whole is evident in an article I read about people in DETROIT who actually starve to death. Are you kidding me. Starve to death in our country. There is no excuse for that. Where is the body of Christ. where are the hands and the feet of the people God put there to do His bidding. ….Pulpit Christianity is for the saved ……everything else we do is supposed to be outreach. How sad that in our country we have the most waist. We have the largest economy in the World well second largest to China. (who basically owns us) that there are people actually dying. People are signing up to go out on missionary journies abroad and yet we can’t even take care of the people in our own front yard. Has our Church actually degenerated down to being a social media like face book. Where we see each other in our pain and think a good Christian Catchphrase will solve the problem. Our a powerful contribed fancy prayer with all the fixins. ……Where is the Power of God that is supposed to accompany the Holy Spirit….the evidences? Don’t we believe that we have the power to raise the dead? Are the 100 million different ministries in our country just about selling t shirts and dvd sets.  Have we as a Church become like the world where we now brand everything and mark it up for profit. And we no longer seek to know the Ultimate Prophet. My heart hurts at this revelation….

I was homeless about 1 and half yrs when I decided to get on a church bus and go to a gymnasium to eat dinner.  I returned again when they were giving out flu shots.  I want you to know this that Gods power to raise the dead and heal the leper is still alive. I am 1 who was changed. I lived another yr on the street but this church would not leave me alone.  We can do this one guy said. Another person told me they believed in me …people in this church who will never get their time on a stage decided to love the unlovable me. The whole time I didn’t trust they trusted for me. Until one day I gave in.

That was not facebook Christianity……We don’t need more pie charts and projections and target market communications. We don’t need to wait for the board to vote We all have this precious little time left to make available to others what we have …..no more t shirts need to be made. We don’t need another self help book written. There is no algorithm to solve or code in. We only need to step outside our front door and share the love of Christ with someone.

My awakening came on a city bus. Normally I wear headphones and I don’t socialize in anyway shape or form….just listen to my music. I am super spiritual because its Christian lol.  But the day before I left them at work so on this day I was forced to be cognicent of my surroundings. Well when I was transferring busses a lady got off with me who was elderly. She strolled behind me and I heard a BAM and I looked back and she face dove into the asphalt of the street…I helped her up and picked up her papers. I never would have heard her hit the ground had I been listening to my music. It gave me a chance to share a little bit and mostly extend some love to a person who was really embarrassed.  On the next bus I was sitting near a guy who was in the men’s mission at Church on the Street. Struggling. I was able to encourage him and share with him how I was there literally once well more then once myself and encourage him to not give up and to keep pressing on and planting good seed who would receive a harvest….it dawned on me. no more headphones. No more status updates and Christian Catchphrases.  Time to get real. Cause there are people dying to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ everywhere we turn… 

WINNING ISN'T WINNING IF YOU DO IT BY LOSING

http://www.safefamilies.org/pastors.php
Winning isn’t Winning if you do it by Losing


How do you define winning? Is it money? Is it status? What is it that drives you? Take a moment and reflect on these questions before you read further.

Now don’t lose your train of thought but follow me for a minute. The word winning has sorely been abused here recently. As a Christian man I have been asking God to reveal to me what offends me about this abuse so bad. And its simple Winning isn’t Winning if you do it by losing.

Orlando Woolridge comes to my mind. He was a great offensive scorer one yr he averaged over 30 points a game. He was the leagues leading scorer. But his team was horrible they lost consistently. You could blame the coach the system he played in but it was that same system that gave him the points. And he was celebrated. I remember even as a kid before I ever played competitive basketball I understood that is not winning. But according to society it was. I guess I was always counter cultural. Praise God!!! Can you imagine if he stood up in the locker-room and received an award for scoring the most points on a team that only won 25 games. I think they even won less but do you get my point. Or if he said something like if you guyes score more we would win. The question comes to mind would you rather score 30 points a game and lose a lot or 15 a game and win a championship. There is a huge difference in mentality and only people who have experienced both sides of life can comprehend the depth of this. He who scores the most points does not win. It’s the team who scores the most points that wins.

Losing sucks. Its painful. As an athlete (not that I was ever much of one) it annoys me still to this day when my team loses to see guys running to the scorers table to get their stats. That’s not winning. When the buzzer sounds in life and when our time is up. There is a final score. You better believe it there is.

Final Score


Its 1988 my grandfather is dying and I am spending my summer with him to say goodbye. My greatest life’s lesson was taught to me that summer. My grandfather had gotten saved and lived the last part of his life serving God. The one and only thing I remember him saying to me that summer was this.

David when your all alone. When you know your dying. When there is no time left on earth. There is only 3 things that matter .
1) Who you loved
2) Who loved you
3) What you did for God.
That’s it he said nothing matters but that. My interpitation of that was bam that’s the only final score that matters. How you calculate that score in your life is what makes you a winner or loser. And the only person who gets to make that call is God.


Real winning is done at the expense of self and builds others up. Winners in life don’t need for someone to get fired to get promoted because they get the guy above them promoted and create their own promotion by doing so. Winners don’t walk into a situation and look for what’s wrong with it they walk in and see opportunity and find a way to make a difference. Winning might mean not getting the headlines but that quite alright Because the headlines were never what the winner is after. Winning is knowing when its time to step aside and when its time to assert your self. Winning is making the extra pass even when it’s a wide open shot you make all the time. (better to build another’s confidence then our own scoring average) Winners don’t care about their critics because with winning comes the critics.

I have only been saved 4 yrs so I am not a career pew sitting Christian. I don’t have any experience in the deep politics that goes on in most church’s . We as Christians are supposed to be the light unto the world. But when it comes to winning sometimes and a lot of the time we are no different then the world.

Winners are not winners because of who they know ….but because of WHO knows them. (Jesus). We only win through Christ. Everything else is temporal.

So now do you remember those questions I asked you? Now let me ask you another set. Have you showed uncommon Love to someone today? What do you do to build someone else? See as a Body of Christ we should be the model of teamwork and self sacrifice. I for one need to work on all this. I get self centered at times. I forget the vision of Christ supersedes the vision of David. If your like me. Set this as a goal. That we will find one person and do uncommon love towards them tomorrow. And we will search out every opportunity to build others around us and let God do the building of us. Because Where ever we Go WE WIN!!! Because of the Winning already done for us!!!

The Cause Within ME

The Cause Within Me

Angie Halverson was her name. She was my first girlfriend. She actually passed me a note that said check yes or no. Oh we never spoke we never did anything even remotely social but she was my girlfriend and I had a letter to prove it. It was my fifth grade yr of school. Sam Case Elementary.  Life was innocent. Life was pure. Being 10 or 11 could not have been better. I had a bike that I road everywhere. I had a baseball mitt that I took everywhere.  And with that my life was complete. See back then kids actually played outside.  I remember my best friend Josh had an original Nintendo but he was the only kid I knew that had one. We did not play baseball on the computer we played baseball at a field. Any field to be exact.

Little League. I remember tryouts that yr. The grass was freshly cut. It smelled awesome. To this day the smell of fresh cut grass reminds me of being in the fifth grade.  The ting from the bat as the coaches hit pop flys to the outfielders. The pop that a glove makes when a ball hits it just right. Wearing cleats was awesome don’t ask me why but I could not wait for tryouts just so I could wear cleats. (the mind of a fifth grader).  I remember being picked. I was the first kid picked. I was picked by the fire department.  The uniforms were identical to the Yankees and that sucked. I am a die hard Dodger fan. Putting on pin stripes made me feel dirty and weird. Lol. But they picked me and the feeling of being picked was amazing.  Even a fifth grader wants to belong to something. Wants to be wanted by someone.  

Fast forward to 2005. How does a guy go from little league to shooting up Chrystal Meth everyday? How does that fifth grader end up homeless? Where did he stop dreaming? If you went out and took a pole or did a survey. If the survey was made of 1question. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP? I am willing to wager that not one fifth grader would answer this way. I want to be a homeless drug addict. In fact you would find that despite economic hardship or economic blessing that every kid from both sides of the tracks from stable and unstable families from every demographic would respond with a healthy desire or dream.  And if you asked all the kids if drugs are good or bad they would all say drugs are bad.  So what gives? The answer is I don’t know.  I don’t know exactly what broke inside of me that drove me to drug addiction. I grew up in and around drugs my whole life. I saw first hand the destructive nature of drugs and that lifestyle of using them brought. Knew full well what happens to people that use them and somehow I still did them.  The battle we are in is even more serious today because the age of innocents has slipped.

Do you remember how I started this entry. I was in the fifth grade. To me that was the last yr of my innocents.  The sixth grade I began skipping school. Stealing was a hobby. And I kissed 36 girls that yr. I kept track which speaks to an even deeper issue. Sixth grade!!!! What does that say. Well one I was a messed up kid.  The seeds were already beginning to sprout roots in my life that would lead to my destruction later on. But also there were 36 girls who had no trouble kissing me. This was the sixth grade!!!!

Make no mistake about this. This is a war.  I hear all the time people say to me that God did not call them to work with kids.  That its great to see people like me being used that way. I will say this. I don’t think God calls anyone to work with kids. I think it is our God given duty and responsibility as adult Christian people to do so. If we can prevent one kid from doing dope. Then we creat a cycle of generational blessing and not a generational curse.  By not working with kids we are spending millions of dollars. Just use me as an example.

I was homeless and on dope hooked on porn and meth. This is what my recovery cost. One guy Pastor Tommy Barnett ran from Phoenix to La to raise money for a Dreamcenter.  Which cost millions of dollars. That Dreamcenter inspired the phoenix Dreamcenter which cost my church millions of dollars.  The operating expenses to house me feed me cloths me were 100k a month.  The people God put there to serve me and to nurse my life back to health don’t get paid so there is an infinite dollar figure attached to that.  For one person to recover to the point I have has cost lets be conservative and say 25 million dollars. We are not even talking all spiritual here cause it really cost a guy his life on a cross for me to recover and that is the ulitimate.

 Now as responsible Christian adults let me ask you this question knowing the financial responsibility of fixing it after it broke don’t you think its just better to help prevent it from being broke.

What can you do?

There are 3 ingredients needed to do preventive maintenance. Time talent Treasure.

You can start or find a ministry to serve in that does this very thing. This will take time and talent. But maybe your talent isn’t this or maybe you are one who don’t have the time. You can give your treasure.  I know if you go to the websites I will list they can receive your donations and I know first hand these people and 100% goes to actually doing the work.  And its all tax deductable.

www.phxdreamcenter.org  602-404-7494 

michelle.cityquest@gmail.org

jcanales@phxdreamcenter.org

AdoptABlockSunnyslope.wmv

Confessions After Midnight

Confessions

After Midnight

          Let me preface this entry with some truth about me. Some things about David that not only will help me heal but hopefully encourage another person in my shoes.

          I am what “experts” in recovery programs call a “Chronic Relapser”. What that means is this. I am motivated by a clock in my head every six or so months sometimes just before I begin to have extreme cravings. Anyone who understands the mental draw to Chrystal Meth knows these cravings can become very intense. I have only ever managed a complete yr of sobriety 1 time. And let me just say in that yr I was constantly fantasizing about using meth again; almost daily.  So I would not even give that yr credit in sobriety because mentally I was toast. But ever since that first yr. I have managed to on queue relapse almost to the day at a 6 month mark. FACT!!!! This pattern in my life has cost me dearly each time. It cost me trust with my wife. (who has stuck by me faithfully) It cost me employment. It also cost me the ability to serve at my Church for an entire yr. (very painful). Here is the biggest thing it cost me. It cost me the confidence that when faced with this challenge I could overcome it. 3 yrs of the same thing same pattern over and over again leads to this. I am sure the drug dealer knows my pattern. I am sure Saten knows my pattern. I am sure everyone knows my pattern.

          This time I win!!!! After a long day of self induced arguments with my wife that actually was 2 days.  And 2 complete days of no sleep. A basketball game where my temper went astray and I got a tech.(though the ref blew the call badly in a close game at the end) hehehehe.  I have to tell the TRUTH!!! It is that time. This is the real game time for me. This is life or death!!! Doing drugs and going to the places a person has to go to acquire drugs isn’t risking a ministry. Isn’t risking a marriage.  Isn’t risking a job. Sure it is risking all those things. But honestly none of those are an issue if I am dead anyways. The trip to the dope man. The time in a seedy hotel locked away with a syringe could cost me my life!!! That is not even close to exaggerating.

          My mission is to plain and simple stay alive and stay sober this 6 month period. I want to see what’s on the other end of this time frame. What does God have in store. I believe I am delivered from addiction this does not eliminate that truth. And I want to be a Joshua and return with a good report that says We can enter into Cannon.  Yes there are giants in the hills but we can defeat them. I am not scared. I won’t be moved by fear. But I am motivated by the promise of God on my life that says He has hope and future for me. Thoughts of Good and not evil.

          This is where the rubber meets the road. God is so good just to give me another day on this planet. I don’t take anything for granted today. It’s all fragile. Very fragile.

          This is common to all people in recovery. Even Christians. Look on May17 2007 I quit smoking two packs a day of cigarettes and never looked back never struggled never had one withdrawal. Gods hand for sure. However for some divine purpose He has allowed me to endure this pattern in life and these cravings every six months. So let the truth be told…My life is not my own. I belong to Him and He decided I should feel this then lets get this thing on !!This is a consequence of using drugs one time let alone for what seems to be a lifetime.  It’s a small price to pay for so many amazing things to be in my life.  This is a great problem to have!!!

          If your reading this and you have been in recovery or need recovery. Your not alone. There are people like you and me who have experience love and faith for you to draw from. If your in the Phoenix area the Phoenix Dreamcenter is a great place to start.  That’s where it all started for me . Then there is the L.A. Dreamcenter. Ok Ok I am partial. There is also Teen Challenge and almost all Rescue Missions have programs. The bottom line is we cannot do this alone.  No we don’t have to be addicts our whole life or confess that garbage to each other and keep wearing grave cloths. But we do need to keep it real and not be too proud to say Hey tonight I am struggling with what ever your addiction is Porn Food Drugs or even just laziness.  The body of Christ is a large body use us. If your not comfortable with finding a place to heal on your own please email me freeman.david45@yahoo.com  We can do this together. We can take those giants on and enter Cannon!!!!