jonathan stegall

Chapter one of This Beautiful Mess introduces the idea of the kingdom of God, and how it can be beautiful and messy at the same time. Love it. In the last couple of years, I have become very interested in the kingdom of God. Through classes and professors, and books like Divine Conspiracy and The Secret Message of Jesus, I’ve learned and thought and questioned what the idea means. Living in present-day America, we often get the message that the kingdom of God is America, or that it is like America. If we get a bit more spiritual, we start to think maybe it’s the end of the world, when Jesus returns and rules over all the earth. But we don’t get the idea that it might mean something to us now. And this, I believe, is why the phrase “kingdom of God” has such a bad taste in the mouths of people we might talk to about it.

Anyway. Like I said, here we are introduced to the idea that the kingdom of God is a beautiful mess. It is messy in that we are messy. We are not expected to clean ourselves up. Jesus is cleaning us up, and using our messes. At Revolution, we often talk about how messy we are. But, in all honesty, the atmosphere there is “Is that all you’ve got? Come on in.” No messes are too messy to be beautiful in the hands of God. And that’s what this chapter is getting at. The beauty is that God likes us. That he wants to experience us, and us to experience him.

Fake Steve:

Long story short, I had my people pack up a crate of Apple products for the Shah and send them to him in New York… Bridge-building has to begin somewhere.

That’s what I’m talking about.

This post is largely for me to consolidate some of the resources I’ve gathered over the years, and will exist in the hopes that it might prove beneficial to others looking for color resources.

First of all, color on the web is largely in a dismal state. Too many years of browsers only supporting 256 colors (and different ones, depending on what operating system) started us off worse than we could wish. On top of that, we have the abyss community that is MySpace, with the illegible content masked by horrible colors. To that, add the lack of knowledge of color theory that many actual designers possess, and there is a decent idea of what is happening. Often, we resort to picking colors from whatever photos we are using, and feel like we’ve done a good job (I’ve done this, and I suspect most other designers have as well).

So. I’m not attempting to fix all the above messes, but to provide some resources that can help.

Tools

One of the sites I have found most useful is Color Theory for web designers. It has several great tools, and some good information as well. Most notably are the Color Wizard, Color Wheel, and Color Contrast Analyzer. Those with art school experience will recognize Contrast as a significant part of C R A P (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity).

Several months ago, Adobe released a color scheme tool called kuler. It can be used online in a Flash-based tool, or it can be downloaded and used with AIR.

And, one of my favorite little programs for Windows is called Pixie. Unfortunately, it does not run on Linux (or OSX, for that matter), and I have been unable to find a good equivalent. It is a tiny little box that, when it is open, shows you the pixel location where your cursor is on your monitor, and then gives you the HTML, RGB, and CMYK values for the color of that pixel.

Whether you are in a program, viewing a website, or looking at your desktop, Pixie sits on top of what you are viewing, and any color’s value is available to you. It has some nice keyboard shortcuts, as well. I use this program extensively, and will drastically miss it whenever my switch away from Windows is complete.

Also, those with a bit of a budget can try Color Schemer.

Resources

The web is full of resources about color, and some of them are very good. One is COLOURlovers, a resource that covers trends and news in the world of color.

Finally, a great starting point of an article for how to use color, and also a good source for other online resources, is Veerle’s article on Choosing color combinations.

Out in Portland, there is a church called Imago Dei Community. They have a podcast. The pastor there is Rick McKinley, who is best known for being Donald Miller’s pastor. Enough links for three sentences?

Anyway. Rick McKinley has written a couple of books. Evidently, he has some copies of This Beautiful Mess around, and has offered to give a copy to people who will write a review about it on their blogs, or wherever. Today, I got my copy. Not only is it amazing that an author would do that, it looks like it will be an amazing book.

I’ve never done it this way before, but my plan is to blog about each chapter as I read it. Another series! Woo ho!

I’m planning to begin a series of posts. I’ve never done a long series of posts (longer than two or three), but I think this one might be a wise thing to do. I’ve written and talked often on the idea that there is often a higher way of looking at things than the typical conservative vs liberal divide, or the typical whatever vs whatever divide. We see this in the writings of N.T. Wright, we see it in writings of Brian McLaren, and many others; but why not discuss some stories? I’ll present views from many different sources, I’m sure.

What stories to tell?

I have several stories in mind, and would like to really delve into this idea over the next few months. Some of them are these:

• Creation
• the Exodus
• formation of the Pentateuch (first 5 books of the Old Testament)
• Job
• Wisdom Literature (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes)
• Jonah
• the Virgin Birth idea
• Weird things Paul wrote
• Revelation

Send me stories

I’m very open to other ideas, but these are things that I’ve had conversations about, thoughts about, and questions about. If you have other ideas, please, post a comment. It may be a few weeks before this little series begins. Ideally, I’d like to be able to release posts on it at intervals; maybe once a week, or once every two weeks (thankfully, WordPress allows bloggers to schedule posts).

I’m not a natural public speaker. Anyone who’s encountered an event where I’ve spoken knows this. Over the years since I’ve been a Christian and interested in and involved in ministry, and also as a web professional, I’ve been able to speak to a variety of different groups in different situations about different topics. These include a couple of churches, several youth ministries, many college classes, business meetings, and Sunday, my friends at Revolution Atlanta.

In speaking to Revolution, a place where I feel completely accepted and comfortable, I made an important observation about myself: my lack of natural ability as a public speaker regularly shows itself the first time I speak to a group.

Interestingly, as I get used to speaking to whatever group it is, and the group gets used to hearing from me and interacting with me, I become at least something of a decent speaker. I believe this is, at least to a large extent, a thing that God has done for me. Prior to a relationship with him, this didn’t occur. Ever. I couldn’t have taught a group how to get their faces out of paper bags. I shook, stuttered, and did all kinds of stupid things on every occasion. Now, I notice myself doing many of these things the first time, or the first couple of times, that I speak to a group. After that, it goes away.

Sunday, I asked myself why it is that I can’t seem to be a decent speaker the first time. I’ve talked in front of a variety of groups, and have had lots of practice, and some formal training in public speaking. I believe that this is possibly designed to maintain humility. There are things in which I’m naturally gifted. Things that I could do without any relationship to God at all, and in fact that I did do without any relationship to God. Many of these things, though, require teaching, or some other kind of public speaking, to be done effectively. Enter some humility, proud fool.

God delights in using the weaknesses of humanity to show his strength. He delights in helping the humble. It’s really frustrating to speak in front of a group and blow it. To forget what I wanted to say, to shake and stutter, sweat and swallow, and whatever else I may do. But when I look at it in light of the fact that when I speak to that group, maybe the first time or maybe the times after that, I may very well be able to speak God thoughts into their lives, or whatever it is that I’m speaking into their lives, it becomes a beautiful thing. Still frustrating, but beautiful.

I’ve recently found a site called Christians Confess. I have to say, this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen on the Internet. While the idea of Christians confessing for the wrongs we’ve committed, especially toward non-Christians, is not new, I love seeing it.

Seeing it online, where hopefully many people will see it, is a wonderful thing. It’s been written about in amazing ways. We at Revolution put it on stickers, it’s been spoken of so many times, and the more we speak of it the better chance we actually have of people believing us. We must be sorry, and we must express it. I must be sorry.