Jon Acuff's Blog, page 174

I like salt & vinegar Pringles. They are clearly the most superior flavor. (Extreme Dill is like putting a belligerent pickle in your mouth.)

I like uniball micro pens. I can't prove this, but when you use one, what you write is 14% better than with a ballpoint. I'm sorry, that's just true.

I like college ruled notebooks. Wide ruled are for lazy people who don't know how to respect a margin.

But you know what I like more than all of those things put together?

Professional athletes who quit...

Last week, Rick Warren tweeted something that got people all fired up.

I didn't see the original tweet at first but based on the reaction, I thought he had said,

"I stole the idea for 'Purpose Driven Life' from an episode of Saved by the Bell where Zack realizes his band Zack Attack is not his purpose"

Turns out that wasn't what he tweeted. It was a lot less inflammatory than that. In fact, I think if he had yelled the same thing he tweeted from a conference stage, we all would have seen it as a...

The only flaw in the book, "Hipster Christianity," is that author Brett McCraken mentions the Stuff Christians Like site. Should we ever meet, I fear that my unibrow, love of Robert Jordan books and unskinny jeans would instantly disqualify me from any degree of hipness.

But this is a great book and one that really challenges our growing obsession with "cool Christianity." The subtitle, "When church and cool collide" sums up the conversation Brett starts perfectly.

And today, he has offered 5 f...

A while ago we had a special giveaway for 20 one year subscriptions to Relevant Magazine. I'm excited to say we've got all the winners listed out at the bottom of this post. In some cases, I put the name of the magazine they said they liked beside the name so that you could easily identify if you were the winner.

If you won, please email me with the following info so that I can send it to Relevant and they can hook you up with a subscription: (I'll delete your info after sending it to...

Recently, I had to write the "goodbye email" you write when you quit a job. I loved the company I worked for and knew I couldn't take the standard approach. Below is what I wrote.

Five things you have to say when you quit:

You've got to write something interesting or funny, but what does that mean? I think it means that you include these five elements in your goodbye email:

1. Reassurance that the company you are leaving is still awesome.

The first thing people do when they leave a company is...

(In the Stuff Christians Like book, a book that declares and fulfills on the promise that God will make you rich if you buy it, I have a chapter about the danger of complaining around missionaries. You can't whine about the amount of cinnamon in your coffee because most missionaries have a spider story that will trump your caffeinated woes. But how do you spot a missionary? Great question and one that Malin, a dentist missionary in Kenya answers in an awesome way. The photo of the family is t...

My friend, who is a Jehovah's Witness, once asked if Southern Baptists used offering baskets with mesh bottoms. He'd heard they did that because then if you tried to tithe with change, it would fall out and loudly proclaim you as a cheapskate. That would hopefully guilt you into giving paper money next week.

I told him it wasn't true and that I hated that his side got Prince.

The offering can be a funny thing though and I haven't written about it often. But recently I experienced something...

My dad uses his feet like hands, much like a gorilla opening a banana, when he loses frisbees in the pond at the disc golf course.

He's not above stripping down to his shorts and diving in to recover discs. The pond is dark brown and is populated with turtles, snakes and frogs. If his disc lands in it, he walks around with his bare feet feeling in calf deep mud for it. Just typing that last sentence made me squirm a little.

But the course we played in Atlanta didn't have that problem. There...

Last weekend, my wife and I started looking for a new church after attending North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia for 6 years. We went to Cross Point, which is where Pete Wilson preaches and we loved it.

During the service, we found ourselves comparing notes between the two, trying to feel out this new place that over a period of years, if not decades, will play an important role in our lives. And I realized 5 things about finding a new church:

1. You will notice silly things.

At ...

Every day that he's in heaven, Solomon better literally thank God that TMZ and paparazzi didn't exist when he was doing his nonsense.

I know some horrible Mel Gibson audio tapes were recently released, but can you imagine the audio from Solomon?

"Hey, I'm thinking about marrying 10 more wives. Probably going to get some of those ladies that are into child sacrifice and establish some high places where we can tape some epic episodes of 'Girls Gone Wild.'"

US Magazine would have had a field day...