there are two things in this world that i hold very near and dear to my heart: spring time and pop punk music. yesterday i was able to experience a little bit of both of them. less than a week after getting the largest snowfall in ten years, we had weather near 60 degrees. add to that a storm system rolling into town and you had 60 degrees and a perfect breeze. i decided to take advantage of the weather, hooked the dog to a leash, grabbed my headphones, and set off on a walk around the neighborhood. this is where the pop punk music came into play. as i was walking, i turned on spotify, started my favorite playlist, and all was right in the world. outside. in february. with my dog. perfect weather. yes please. in the middle of the walk, a song that i hadn’t heard in…

last week i felt like i was in high school all over again. i was younger than everyone all through school. having a mid-october birthday meant that i beat the deadline for my grade by two days. if i was born two days later, i would’ve went from the youngest in my grade to the oldest. because of that, i didn’t get my driver’s license until october 25 of my junior year. and because of that, i had to rely on my friends for a ride to pretty much everything. in the beginning of that junior year, some friends of mine were in a band and were playing a house show across town. two of my friends told me that they were going to go over to the house, help the guys get set up and do a sound check, and then they’d come pick me up before the show.…

sometimes i wear sweatpants to the grocery store. i know that, culturally, wearing sweat pants is a sign of uncleanliness. it means that i truly don’t care what people think. it means that i’m sloppy. it shows that i’ve given up. in reality, it just means that i got tired of trying to hide all of my messiness. hiding all of the messiness gets exhausting. you go to work and you hide the messiness at home from your coworkers. you leave there and go home and you hide the messiness at work from your family. you go to bed and try to hide the messiness from your dreams only to wake up and do the entire process all over again. and sometimes sweatpants are your reminder that it’s okay to stop hiding the mess and bring it into the public. this past sunday reminded me that sometimes acknowledging the mess…

we’re three days into 2014 and i can already point out something that will be a huge trend this year: criticizing dating. i’ve seen buzzfeed posts about how maybe dating isn’t right for you. i’ve seen people make resolutions that they weren’t going to date for x amount of months. there have been tweets saying you shouldn’t date until you find this person or until you are in this place in life. that’s stupid. i’m serious. i think that’s stupid. while it’s popular to say that people should be dating less, i think it’s important for 2014 to be the year that dating makes its return. i had a professor in seminary who told one of his classes that he encouraged his daughter to date as many guys as possible. for a conservative pastor, that seemed a little odd. when we asked him to explain what he meant, he told…

if it were me, i would’ve said screw it and started over. if it were me, i would’ve broken my promise. if it were me, there’s no way i would’ve done what he did. god, the creator of everything who could destroy and recreate the human race with one sentence, had every right to do just that. if it were me, that’s what would’ve happened. but god had such a desire to be with his creation that he sent his son to be with them with the sole intent of dying the most embarrassing, humiliating, and painful death known to man. and he did all of that just so that he could hang out with us and we could hang out with him. instead of destroying us, he redeemed us. instead of starting over, he kept going. instead of no hope, he gave us the hope of the world. that’s…

i was a scene kid growing up. i spent most friday and saturday nights at shows from local bands that most of you have never heard of. bands like mercy mercedes, or monday in london, or brentwood, or osf, or three stars left, or one of a hundred other bands that only lasted for two months. in my little area of redneck north carolina there weren’t many true venues so we’d have shows at churches, basements, and even next to a guy’s pool one time. i was introduced to the scene my freshman year of high school and was hooked. music became my thing. i stopped playing sports and started focusing all of my attention on playing, listening to, and being around music. i was in the marching band, concert band, jazz band, pep band, and a terrible ska band. i even did an internship for a couple of months…

before i get started today, i want to take a second and thank all of you who read monday’s post. i’m super thankful for all of you and appreciate you taking the time to read. if you missed monday’s post, i started a multi-day look at the song “church” by macklemore where i’ll be looking at different sections of the song and talking about where he and geo (aka prometheus brown) hit the nail on the head and also where they were a little wrong. if you’d like to read monday’s post, you can read it here. i had some friends in college who, if you were to say the word “catholic” around them, would go on long-winded diatribes about how the catholic church was so wrong and how they weren’t really christians. i guess that would be par for the course at any conservative christian college but it was…