The Next Survivor Series

THE NEXT SURVIVOR SERIES

Six married men will be dropped on an island with one car and
3 kids each for six weeks.

Each kid will play
two sports
and either take music
or dance classes. They will also attend cubs, brownies, sea cadets or
similar.

There is no fast food.

Each man must:
take care of his 3 children,
keep his assigned house clean,
correct all homework,
and complete science projects,
also, cook, do laundry,
and pay a list of 'pretend' bills
with not enough money.

In addition, each man
will have to budget in money
for groceries each week.

Each man
must remember the birthdays
of all their friends andrelatives,
and send cards out
on time--no emailing.

Each man must also
take each child to a doctor's appointment,
a dentist appointment
and a haircut appointment.

He must make
one unscheduled andinconvenient
visit per child
to A & E

He must also
make gingerbread men or choc chip cakes
for a social function.

Each man will be responsible for
decorating his own assigned house,
planting flowers outside
and keeping it presentable
at all times.

The men will only
have access to television
when the kids are asleep
and all chores are done.

The men must
shave their legs,
wear makeup daily,
adorn themselves with jewellery,
wear uncomfortable yet stylish shoes,
keep fingernails polished
and eyebrows groomed.

During one of the six weeks,
the men will have to endure severe abdominal pain, persistent lower
back
aches,
and have extreme, unexplained mood swings, but never once complain or
slow down from other duties.

They must attend
weekly school meetings, concerts & plays, church, and find time
at least once a week, to spend the afternoon
in the park or a similar setting.

They will need to
read a book to the kids
each night and in the morning,
feed them, dress them,
brush their teeth and
comb their hair by 7:00 am.

A test will be given at the end of the six weeks, and each father will
be required to know all of the following information:
each child's birthday,
height, weight,
shoe size, clothes size, teachers name, best friends name and doctor's
name.
Also the child's weight at birth,
time of birth,
and length of labour,
each child's favourite colour,
middle name,
favourite snack,
favourite song,
favourite drink,
favourite toy,
biggest fear and
what they want to be when they grow up.

The kids vote them off the island
based on performance.
The last man wins only if...
he still has enough energy
to be intimate with his spouse
at a moment's notice.

If the last man does win,
he can play the game over and over
and over again for the next 18-25 years
eventually earning the right
To be called Mother!

Forgiveness

Dead Men Walking

In war-torn relationships of Northern Uganda, forgiveness is complicated. Betty was a teenager when her village was raided by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel army known for its brutal tactics and widespread human rights violations. She was kidnapped as a sex slave for a commander and ordered to commit callous acts of violence as a child soldier, until gradually she was broken and became an active member of the LRA.

After six years of bloodshed, however, Betty managed to escape, running across country to freedom. But coming home would not be a simple matter of returning. She had committed violence against the very people she hoped to rejoin. Her own guilt and shame was as palpable as the mistrust and anger of her village. In her absence, two of her own brothers had been killed by the same army Betty fought alongside.

In the midst of such loss, with so many permanent scars, forgiveness might seem hopeful, but perhaps naïve at best. Is reconciliation even to be desired when brokenness is irreversible? Does forgiveness cease to be hopeful when neither party can ever be the same again?

The people of Uganda believe it is. For hundreds and hundreds of children like Betty, terrorized by crimes they were forced to commit and returning home to terrorized villages, tribal elders have adapted a ceremony to make it possible for both. In a ceremony that includes the act of breaking and stepping on an egg and an opobo branch, the returnee is cleansed from the things he or she has done while away. The egg symbolizes innocent life, and by breaking and placing themselves in its broken substance, returnees declare before their village their desire to be restored to the way they used to be. In a final step over a pole, the returnees step into new life. In many cases, women returnees come home with babies who were born in the bush, usually a result of rape. When they arrive at the broken egg, the child’s foot is placed in the substance, too. The spirit of reconciliation, like warfare, must touch everyone.

...

In a single weekend, Christians have just remembered the crucifixion of Jesus, his burial on Good Friday, the silence of Holy Saturday, and the terror and amazement of Easter Sunday. In a weekend, we were reminded how the disciples failed him miserably, falling asleep when he needed them most in prayer, denying ever knowing him as he was convicted for being himself, watching him die alone from a distance. In a weekend, we moved from recognizing ourselves in this list of failures to sensing the hopeful confusion of the disciples, the overwhelm of Thomas, and the timid longing of the women at the tomb. In a single weekend, we moved from complete despair to shocking hope, total darkness to surprising light, the finality of death to the last word of resurrection, from broken and sinful to restored and forgiven.

In this solitary weekend, Christians remember a story that should make the bold and touching forgiveness of war-torn Ugandans seem natural, expected, and necessary, however shocking or complicated or slow-coming it might be for us. After the egg-breaking ceremony, Betty went from rebel to ex-rebel, shamed to restored. “I feel cleansed,” she said of the ceremony. After a day of being welcomed and celebrated, she adds, “Some of the bad things in my heart: they are gone.”(1) Alex Boraine, deputy chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, notes of such radical forgiveness: “[With its] uncomfortable commitment to bringing the perpetrator back into the family, Africa has something to say to the world.”(2)

So does Christ Jesus. In one eventful weekend, we remember the ugly depths of our sin and stare into the deep scars of the servant who bore it away. This utter shift in our condition is as overwhelming as Good Friday, as dumbfounding as Holy Saturday, and as inconceivable as Easter Sunday. But it is our ceremony. Christ is broken, we are covered in his blood, and we emerge as dead men walking. How beyond our knowing, that in the Father’s inexplicable mercy and loving-kindness, to redeem a slave, He gave a Son. Yet because God did, in a weekend, we can claim again this mystery; we can claim the power of reconciliation; we can claim Christ, who has moved us from perpetrator to family.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Abraham McLaughlin, “Africa After War: Paths To Forgiveness--Ugandans Welcome ‘Terrorists’ Back” Christian Science Monitor, October 23, 2006.
(2) Ibid.

From Ravi Zacharias

A secular mindset seems to have invaded the church. What has been the result of this for the church?

Zacharias: A secular mindset is manifested in some forms — not all forms — of the emergent church. This is a dangerous phenomenon, and some of its protagonists undervalue its end results. When you think that every generation tends to move away from the previous one, some forms of the emergent church today are flirting with the extinction of the gospel, at the heart of which is the cross of Jesus Christ.

Two things have happened in the secular mindset. First, secular-minded people do not take the church seriously because the church is not answering their questions. Second, those within the church are timid and unable to sustain the supernatural side of their beliefs in a highly naturalistic world.

What remains, then, in this kind of religious belief system is a spirituality that does not need to defend itself because it is purely a private thing that does not moralize or pontificate for anyone else. It becomes a feel-good, be-quiet, and get-a-better-state-of-mind-at-the-end-of-the-day religion. Moral absolutes? One revelation from God who has moral boundaries for us? No, that becomes untenable. So the church, when it did not respond to the secular mindset and did not prepare its own people, became secularized. In the end, it became spirituality without truth, and experience without objective reference.

The average church member today is unprepared and ill-equipped to face the attacks that are coming at us full-force. We are leaving our young men and women who are attending universities as lambs led to the slaughter. We have fought symptoms, like the issues of the Second World War. We were shooting at rubber dummies while the real attack was taking place elsewhere.