Do you want to know what it is?

I've alway been a little into conspiracy theories. The grassy knoll, Roswell, the Steelers purposely breaking Carson Palmer's leg in 2005, etc. I've found that you are culturally allowed to be interested in conspiracy theories and alternate realities so long as you don't fully believe them. It's acceptable to watch UFO specials on the Discovery Channel during a bout of insomnia so long as you don't come to work the next day convinced that we are not alone in the universe.

We all have those people in our lives who believe everything is a conspiracy. I don't have enough faith in people to believe in too many conspiracies. I don't believe that lots of people can keep the same big secret all the way to their graves. At the end of the day, I tend to fall in line and "think normally." Maybe there are aliens out there, but I don't think the government is hiding them in New Mexico. Maybe it wasn't just Lee Harvey Oswald, but he probably had something to do with it. I'm pretty sure 9-11 had more to do with Osama bin Laden than Dick Cheney. You see where I'm going with this...

Now, here's the thing. Though in some regards I am a very normal thinker, I am also the ultimate conspiracy theorist. When it comes to the bigger than big questions of life, I think we have all pretty much been duped. I think we think upside down. What is real, we think is unreal. What is counterfeit, we think is legit. We functionally live our lives with an upside down belief structure. We are dizzy and lost - drunk on what we have come to call "reality."

When it comes to Jesus, many of us (myself included) probably still don't really get him. We've hippie-ized, American-ized, politicized, modernized, suburbanized, mythicized, and sanitized him so much that we've turned him into the opposite of who he was. The Bible has a word for that sort of creation - an anti-Christ.

Jesus came to throw our assumptions on their heads. He called us to live a life that requires we believe in conspiracies. We have to believe that God himself is conspiring against the fallen and evil powers of this world or we will never be able to understand anything Jesus taught us.

We're launching RESET this weekend at VCC. Let's be brave enough to start over. Brave enough to realize that all of us have assumptions about Jesus passed down to us by our culture and our families. Let's push the reset button (take the red pill) and see what happens.



"Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?"