Are you making something? BY SETH GODIN

Making something is work. Let's define work, for a moment, as something you create that has a lasting value in the market.

Twenty years ago, my friend Jill discovered Tetris. Unfortunately, she was working on her Ph.D. thesis at the time. On any given day the attention she spent on the game felt right to her. It was a choice, and she made it. It was more fun to move blocks than it was to write her thesis. Day by day this adds up... she wasted so much time that she had to stay in school and pay for another six months to finish her doctorate.

Two weeks ago, I took a five-hour plane ride. That's enough time for me to get a huge amount of productive writing done. Instead, I turned on the wifi connection and accomplished precisely no new measurable work between New York and Los Angeles.

More and more, we're finding it easy to get engaged with activities that feel like work, but aren't. I can appear just as engaged (and probably enjoy some of the same endorphins) when I beat someone in Words With Friends as I do when I'm writing the chapter for a new book. The challenge is that the pleasure from winning a game fades fast, but writing a book contributes to readers (and to me) for years to come.

One reason for this confusion is that we're often using precisely the same device to do our work as we are to distract ourselves from our work. The distractions come along with the productivity. The boss (and even our honest selves) would probably freak out if we took hours of ping pong breaks while at the office, but spending the same amount of time engaged with others online is easier to rationalize. Hence this proposal:

The two-device solution

Simple but bold: Only use your computer for work. Real work. The work of making something.

Have a second device, perhaps an iPad, and use it for games, web commenting, online shopping, networking... anything that doesn't directly create valued output (no need to have an argument here about which is which, which is work and which is not... draw a line, any line, and separate the two of them. If you don't like the results from that line, draw a new line).

Now, when you pick up the iPad, you can say to yourself, "break time." And if you find yourself taking a lot of that break time, you've just learned something important.

Go, make something. We need it!

Entering into the Story of the Bible by Scot McKnight

An excerpt from a great book on reading Scripture in a way that informs and transforms our lives every day...The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible

The Bible is what the Bible is, and I believe it. "Let the Bible be the Bible" is my motto, because teaching the Bible has taught me that the Bible will do its own work if we get out of the way and let it. Someone once said that the Bible needs no more defending than a lion, and I agree.

I have learned that when we take our hands off the pages of the Bible, read and listen to its words, and enter into its story by faith, something happens. It renews and continues to renew its powers. It becomes what it was meant to be, something both more intimate than an old pair of jeans and more unusual than alien creatures, something like a familiar stranger or an unpredictable neighbor or a pet lion whose presence invigorates its surroundings. Something like the glory of the ocean, which on the surface appears gentle and strolling and pleasant to observe, but under that surface there's a vibrant, teeming, swirling, dynamic world full of beauty and wonder. Or perhaps listening to the Bible is like having the most powerful person in the world sit down with you for coffee as a friend and chat with you.

Hot Theology by Dan Kimball

Here's a pretty insightful blog with an amazing final quote from Spurgeon and a great Seinfeld episode reference as it deals with a significant theological issue in our day...I reread it as this topic will grow in significance as many talk about the release of Rob Bell's new book this March...I am hopeful people will actually read the book and dialogue intelligently...

If we ignore the reality of hell, we make one of Jesus' frequent teachings a mere metaphor.

Clocking in at 55 minutes, I nearly broke my personal record for the longest sermon I've ever preached. It was "Hell."

In our series called "Hot Theology," the topics were determined from surveys of the congregation. The most common question: "Would a loving God send people to hell?" That's hard to cover in 35 minutes.

The subject of hell and judgment is all over the New Testament. Still, we don't hear much about hell today, at least not from the church. We tend to cover other subjects repeatedly, but ignore one that Jesus talks about all the time. There are some exceptions, but the preachers yelling "turn or burn" on street corners are rare.

There is an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine's boyfriend, Puddy, becomes a Christian. He starts listening to Christian music and begins badgering Elaine about going to hell. At one point he asks her to steal the neighbor's newspaper for him because she's "the one going to hell, so [she] might as well steal it." Elaine explodes, starts whacking him with the newspaper, and screams, "If I am going to hell, you should care that I'm going to hell!"

I think Elaine has the right perspective. We cannot approach the subject of hell merely as a doctrine and ignore the human impact. Teaching on hell is not for the sake of knowing Christian trivia or to satisfy theological curiosity. If we believe in hell, and if we believe people created in God's image will either experience eternity in communion with him or apart from him, then we should be communicating the gospel, both the good news and the bad news.

Of course, this calls for balance. Christians have often been guilty of making hell the primary motivation for salvation. I believe this is an alteration of the holistic gospel found in 1 Corinthians 15. But if we completely ignore the reality of hell and judgment, we are forced to make one of Jesus' frequent teachings little more than an obscure metaphor.

Because of the church's tendency to be unbalanced about hell, and because of our cultural assumptions about the afterlife, I began my sermon by having the congregation read aloud every single New Testament passage about hell. The exercise took several minutes but it got people participating and thinking. We compared these passages with popular portrayals of hell—from The Far Side cartoons to AC/DC's "Highway to Hell"—to see how we've had our beliefs shaped by pop culture, the red devil with horns and a pitchfork, and all that.

Then we looked at concepts of the afterlife from other cultures and religions. Christians aren't the only ones who believe in a "hell." Despite our culture's growing discomfort with eternal judgment, we shouldn't be embarrassed by a belief that's been almost universally held throughout history and still is today.

I led the congregation through a study of the words translated "hell" in English: Jesus described Gehenna, the garbage dump outside Jerusalem where bodies were thrown, where worms ate flesh, and where fires continually burned.

Finally, we returned to Elaine on Seinfeld and what matters most—the mission.

As Charles Spurgeon said, "If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to Hell over our bodies. If they will perish, let them perish with our arms around their knees. Let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for."

Dan Kimball is the pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California