Pocket Taser Stun Gun, a great gift for the wife. A guy who purchased his lovely wife a pocket Taser for their anniversary submitted this:
Last weekend I saw something at Larry’s Pistol & Pawn Shop that sparked my interest. The occasion was our 15th anniversary and I was looking for a little something extra for my wife Julie. What I came across was a 100,000-volt, pocket/purse-sized Taser.. The effects of the Taser were supposed to be short lived, with no long-term adverse affect on your assailant, allowing her adequate time to retreat to safety….?? WAY TOO COOL! Long story short, I bought the device and brought it home.
I loaded two AAA batteries in the darn thing and pushed the button. Nothing! I was disappointed. I learned, however, that if I pushed the button AND pressed it against a metal surface at the same time; I’d get the blue arc of electricity darting back and forth between the prongs. AWESOME!!! Unfortunately, I have yet to explain to Julie what that burn spot is on the face of her microwave.
Okay, so I was home alone with this new toy, thinking to myself that it couldn’t be all that bad with only two triple-A batteries, right?
There I sat in my recliner, my cat Gracie looking on intently (trusting little soul) while I was reading the directions and thinking that I really needed to try this thing out on a flesh & blood moving target.
I must admit I thought about zapping Gracie (for a fraction of a second) and thought better of it. She is such a sweet cat. But, if I was going to give this thing to my wife to protect herself against a mugger, I did want some assurance that it would work as advertised. Am I wrong?
So, there I sat in a pair of shorts and a tank top with my reading glasses perched delicately on the bridge of my nose, directions in one hand, and Taser in another.
The directions said that a one-second burst would shock and disorient your assailant; a two-second burst was supposed to cause muscle spasms and a major loss of bodily control; a three-second burst would purportedly make your assailant flop on the ground like a fish out of water. Any burst longer than three seconds would be wasting the batteries. All the while I’m looking at this little device measuring about 5′ long, less than 3/4 inch in circumference; pretty cute really and (loaded with two itsy, bitsy triple-A batteries) thinking to myself, ‘no possible way!’
What happened next is almost beyond description, but I’ll do my best…? I’m sitting there alone, Gracie looking on with her head cocked to one side as to say, ‘don’t do it stupid,’ reasoning that a one second burst from such a tiny little ole thing couldn’t hurt all that bad. I decided to give myself a one second burst just for heck of it. I touched the prongs to my naked thigh, pushed the button, and . . . HOLY MOTHER OF GOD . . . WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION . . . WHAT THE HADES!!!
I’m pretty sure Jessie Ventura ran in through the side door, picked me up in the recliner, then body slammed us both on the carpet, over and over and over again. I vaguely recall waking up on my side in the fetal position, with tears in my eyes, body soaking wet, both nipples on fire, manhood nowhere to be found, with my left arm tucked under my body in the oddest position, and tingling in my legs?
The cat was making meowing sounds I had never heard before, clinging to a picture frame hanging above the fireplace, obviously in an attempt to avoid getting slammed by my body flopping all over the living room.
Note: If you ever feel compelled to ‘mug’ yourself with a Taser, one note of caution: there is no such thing as a one second burst when you zap yourself! You will not let go of that thing until it is dislodged from your hand by a violent thrashing about on the floor. A three second burst would be considered conservative?
SON-OF-A-GUN, THAT HURT LIKE HECK!!!
A minute or so later (I can’t be sure, as time was a relative thing at that point), I collected my wits (what little I had left), sat up and surveyed the landscape. My bent reading glasses were on the mantel of the fireplace. The recliner was upside down and about 8 feet or so from where it originally was. My triceps, right thigh and both nipples were still twitching. My face felt like it had been shot up with Novocain, and my bottom lip weighed 88 lbs. I had no control over the drooling. Apparently I wet myself, but was too numb to know for sure and my sense of smell was gone. I saw a faint smoke cloud above my head which I believe came from my hair. I’m still looking for my manhood and I’m offering a significant reward for their safe return!!
P. S. My wife loved the gift, and now regularly threatens me with it!
‘If you think Education is difficult, try being stupid.’
Archive for April, 2008
Well it is midnight on a Monday night and you may be wondering why in the world I would be blogging… especially considering that I am desperately missing my mistress… sleep. I haven’t seen much of her lately but tonight I need to push off her tempting warm comforter and soft fluffy pillow for just a few more minutes.
I almost titled this blog Winds of Change because they are blowing here at InDependence, again. Just one of many rapidly occurring events that seem to be happening so quickly, yet so slowly all at the same time, that are shaping our ministry before our eyes. The vision is unfolding and just saying “are you on board?”
I am blogging tonight for me. No I am not playing hard to get (with my mistress), but I just needed to put some of thoughts down for my own therapeutic gain. I am doing some soul searching tonight on a few decisions and I was discussing them with my wife but she fell asleep on me mid sentence. I couldn’t believe it either, but rest assured I now have ammunition for our next lack of communication discussion.
Don’t worry I will be merciful because of what I did to her on Sunday morning. God continues to blow me away and provide us with some new opportunities. I just can’t believe it how His plan works in spite of me. The opportunities seem to come at moments when you don’t seem to have the means available to accept them. In my childish mind I just visualize God saying “I dare you, no I double dog dare you to trust me.” I dare you to stay one step in front of the reality check that says, “How can we do this?”
God’s great sense of humor at play… I linked to the recorded sermon I preached a year ago at Life Pointe and in the message I said “If we will come up with the WHAT God always provides the HOW”. Well Pastor Nathan Griffis, 31 year old church planter, founder of InDependence Church are you going to practice what you preach? Will you live in your current reality or will you leap out of the proverbial plane you referred to in the above referenced message?
Well God… for a decision this big I am asking for conformation in my spirit because I know where my head is at on this. If You will provide that to me, because You love me and wired me with this analytical brain that evaluates everything way too much and is up at 12:30am now still thinking about it, I will continue to run just as hard and fast as I can toward complete Dependence. (Yes honey I know that is a run-on and on sentence but it is late or early or something) I will do my best to remember that You are God and that You have made promises to me. You have not only placed your word in my heart but You have placed a drive to grow Your Kingdom here in Weston.
So I thank You in advance for Your confirmation and I am looking forward to seeing provision and direction in this situation. Great, so now I blogged about it and have a new found peace in the situation, now I am all excited and won’t be able to spend time with my mistress. Sorry I can’t tell you about the potential ministry altering decision yet but I would appreciate your prayers and if you lose some sleep over it with me I would appreciate that. Okay, so that was a selfish request but I can’t lie to you given our next series, “The Moment of Truth”.
So I am going on record as saying that yesterday was the best service that we have had so far. It wasn’t our biggest crowd and included some challenges like figuring out that I need to buy a battery charger for our trailer because after just three weeks of using the electric brakes the battery is done, but still the best so far.
I hate when Pastor’s say this every week (so I try not to) but I had a great time delivering what has commonly been considered the most challenging of messages. We closed out our Elephant in the Church Series with The Greedy Elephant – Stewardship. As you read this I am sure that you think we just talked about money. Well we did talk about possessions but we also talked about stewardship of self, time, talent and family.
Being that we are a church plant who invested much of its outside support in some great equipment form Church on Wheels and marketing, we have been doing our best to make ends meet week to week on our own. Some (certainly not all or even enough) church plants that I have read about continue to receive outside support for a period of 2-3 years after they are launched. Even though we do continue to receive some outside support (and are continuing to try to raise more) we are fighting to survive on our own.
So in order to raise the comfort level of people who give to our ministry or are debating about giving to our ministry (time, talent and resources) we opened up the books for the congregation to see. Instead of making it feel like a business meeting we allowed people to text message questions (ala Mark Driscoll) regarding our finances and vision.
We went a little longer than I had anticipated and I thought our Children’s Pastor (my wife) was going to kill me for having a 2hr service when we are normally 1.25hrs. So thank you to the guy selling flowers at the corner of Flamingo & Griffin for helping me out. But we got through about 15 questions of varying difficulty and only missed a couple like, “Does InDependence have a world vision?” and “Are considering sponsoring missions trips in the future?” The answers to both of those are yes. If you weren’t able to make it this weekend we may actually make this the first message we post online. We have the recording end down but we have a little work on the web end. So it may take us while to get the messages we are recording online but we hope to accomplish that very soon. I was impressed by the questions that came flowing in and the energy in the room was great. My intention was not to guilt anybody into giving. First of all I am not that good at it and I really don’t want to be. I don’t believe that guilt should be people’s motivations. Maybe if InDependence falls on its financial face I will think differently, but I doubt it. I wanted people to be motivated to be Biblical stewards in all the above listed areas because they love Jesus and the word of God lays it out for them. Imagine that trying to promote people being “cheerful givers” not “guilty givers.”
Any time you throw out the “G” word – give and the “T” word – tithe you can expect some level of discomfort, especially if you are not putting it in a “prosperity” package. (Which I didn’t) Even though we had quite a few first time guests the Holy Spirit made it easy to tell the truth about giving ourselves and the stuff God has let us borrow.
For the last few weeks we have been trying a few different methods to record our services so that we can get them up online and even podcast down the road. On Wednesday the gentleman who has taken the initiative to do this let me hear the recording from a few weeks ago. The quality was incredible and the sound was crisp and clear but what I heard made me never want to record another sermon. I had heard myself recorded one other time when I spoke at Life Pointe a year ago. When I heard that message I thought that with being a portable church in a theater that the recording quality might be off. I now know that wasn’t the issue then and isn’t the issue now.
The issue is that I have the voice of a complete DORK. I am praying that between now and two weeks from now, when we hope to start posting our messages, I will go through puberty and get a real voice. I sound like Marvin the Martian from Bugs Bunny. If I could have somehow worked in the word M-O-D-U-L-A-T-O-R in my message you would have thought it was him. So this is my preemptive apology to any one who reads this and then listens to me online or on your IPOD down the road. I think what I am going to do is to get a celebrity to do a voiceover like in the Geico commercials. I wonder if Peter Frampton is still available because that would just be awesome… “Do you feel (the Spirit) like I do?”
Got this today and wanted to share… Mr. Racoon you’re next!
This coming Sunday night I am Taking InDependence on the Road (sort of). I just wanted to let all my “groupies” know. This is the first time I have ever been invited to preach a revival. To be honest I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I have preached outside of my home churches. It isn’t really something that I have pursued so I guess if you aren’t asking for opportunities you probably aren’t going to get many. Combine that with not knowing too many people and not being that evangelistically talented, you get a pretty lean preaching schedule. Even though the environment at The River is pretty different than
So I don’t write a whole lot of blogs directed just too church planters, but here is one. I recently had a friend of mine (a fellow church planter) tell me that the day after he preaches he has to stay busy or he gets into a funk. We discussed how rock starts have this post performance thing also but often times they just mask it with drugs, alcohol and women. I am excited to say that he isn’t going that route. Even though I go through something, I don’t feel depressed like he does. If anything I am relieved that it is over because we made it through another week. So far we have done that without any serious meltdowns. I think the week before last was actually the first time (other than my mouth getting in the way of my thoughts) that we had much of a glitch at all. Considering all of the potential issues we could have… a power bar kicking off and needing to be reset which caused the loss of stage lighting and one projector wasn’t that bad. I know that a lot of people struggle to get in gear on Monday mornings but it seems like the last few weeks it has been getting harder and harder. Maybe it has to do with us being portable and participating in a full body aerobic workout before and after service; but today I am just mentally and physically exhausted. For the past 13 weeks I have worked 7 days a week and I don’t even know how many hours. Don’t feel sorry for me because I am guilty of taking this on. But I just wanted to share what I am learning. There is always 6 days or less till Sunday. I have read a lot of books talking about the value of monthly preview services to get you into the swing of things. I am a huge advocate of those but transitioning from 30 days between services down to 6 is a big transition. I don’t know the answer maybe it is reducing the time between previews as you go along but regardless get ready Sundays come quick.
I heard a story about a kid’s basketball team recently where one of the kids was bigger and in basketball in the early years size plays a big factor as kids develop their skill. The children’s parents told their son to hold on to the ball and don’t pass it if you want to win. I am almost sad to say that the team did win and there are certain times when holding onto the rock can bring success. What I have found over 13 weeks of holding too many rocks is that they get heavy. I have done my best to give people the assist but here is my challenge. I am not afraid that people can’t handle the rock. God has given us some incredibly talented people who in many cases are more talented than I am. My fear has been that they will get tired of carrying the mail, tired of taking it to the hole, and any other basketball analogy you can think of regarding the effort of it takes to get the ball through the goal. Being portable and being a new church we use a lot of people for set-up and tear down in addition to normal church duties like hospitality. So we multi-task plain and simple… For a month or so I have been tracking our volunteer percentage and it has been over 40% of total attendance (including kids) every week so that is pretty good. Still we have a lot of people doing multiple jobs and even though I have had people say “we’ll do whatever” I have tried to utilize their gifts, talents and passions to get the most effectiveness. I learned that managing in the business world but I am not sure it is the best governing tool in a young church plant. So…This past week I have started dishing more rocks. I am trying to utilize talents and passions where I can and then everywhere else I am trying to find levels of commitment. I don’t want to burn people out and that is not my intention. I am challenging people to get more involved and at the same time I am challenging them to work their way out of a job by looking for additional volunteers. I don’t know if it is going to work but when we started going week to week I gave myself 6 months till complete exhaustion. I knew that God either had to provide us help or would have to increase my AQ (adversity quotient). The jury is still out on the 6 months, but I know there is only 6 days to Sunday.
First let me clarify why I am posting this excerpt from an unsolicited e-mail I received recently. (I hope the unnamed individual doesn’t mind me posting it) This isn’t a vain attempt to boost my ego even though I am encouraged by their words. This isn’t to say that we are a perfect church that has it all together because we are not even close, but I am proud of where we are headed and what God is up to. I am not posting this to say that we are the only people who get accolades like this because I can rattle off a whole lot of churches in the country and in my immediate area that are being great representatives of Jesus.
I wanted to post this because a lot of the people who work so incredibly hard every week making InDependence work read this blog. There are people reading this who give sacrificially to our ministry, from our church and abroad. There are people who pray for our ministry often based on the needs I express on this site. So, I just want them to know that their physical, spiritual and financial sacrifices are making an impact for the Kingdom here in Weston,
I also want to give God some credit. I think sometimes we church planters give credit to the latest book of helpful hints, information we got from our coaching networks or the last great conference that transformed our minds and our ministries. Even though I am all for those things, and recently applied for a spot in a great coaching network, without God in the mix we are dead in the water.
So check out how God is wrecking people for the good:
“…When I left my previous church, I had a really big problem. I felt disgust for the church. Every time I’d set out looking for a new church I’d find the same thing over and over again. I gave up on attending any church because I came to the conclusion that churches nowadays are knockoffs of what the church originally was, this, to the extent of even believing that we were basically disgracing the name of Jesus and God with all the misrepresentation.
When I first came to InDependence I was shook up. I found nothing but rock solid reality, no games, no shows, just straightforward reality. Embracing all your mistakes and converting them into your strengths, instead of hiding and hiding… it saved me from thinking that Jesus legacy had completely gone astray.
I really felt like I needed to say this to you, because, I really really really really was repulsed by today’s churches. And I hate to say it like that, but that’s what was in my mind…”
To steal the words from David Crowder, “Beautiful Collision”.
I have missed a few 5 minute blogs but here is a quickie (not the kind we were talking about Sunday)… So last night I had a romantic night with Uncle Sam. So my tax situation seemingly gets more complicated every year and this year was the worst yet. Two jobs, Self-Employed Income and Expenses, Rental Property, Investment Interest, Charitable Contributions, etc. If this wasn’t enough I have to throw in the word Clergy. Turbo Tax was quite helpful with all but the last part.
I first tried the online package where they evaluate just how advanced of a program you need. Well after hitting the clergy wall and the help answers being more complicated than the questions I decided to download the Home Business Edition. They listed a bunch of the stuff that I needed. I went pretty gracefully through all of it, until I got to the Self-Employed Clergy stuff. A majority of my income was actually expense reimbursement but Turbo Tax is just not equipped to efficiently help us men/women of the cloth. I know that a majority of the pastors who read this just said no duh!
So after working through some worksheets on the IRS site and working directly in the Turbo Tax forms I think I got it all wrapped up at 4:00am. The problem was I got in a zone and was afraid to stop because I knew all my thoughts would turn into a pumpkin muffin at dawn. So word to the wiser than me, there is no TURBO in Taxes for clergy. Hindsight is always 20/20 but I just didn’t feel like I had enough time to sit down with a tax guy or girl because I have found that a majority of them don’t know how to deal with pastoral salaries either. That and I don’t know any that would have helped me at 9:00 pm when I started. I will say that I am happy about the record keeping practices that the Executive Pastor at my old church taught me. He is also a CPA and probably would have helped a brother out but going to Orlando wasn’t exactly in the schedule either. I am excited to say that I am getting back a little something that I let Sammy borrow from me. One question though…How come I have to give him interest when I am late but he doesn’t?
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