Thursday, January 26, 2006

DEVOTION

Well, we are into week two in our early morning study of Michael Slaughter's book, "Momentum for Life." There are about a dozen of us gathering on Wednesday mornings at 6:30 AM to discuss what we are reading and learning about self leadership. Slaughter says, "if you can't lead yourself, you won't be effective in leading others. Self leadership precedes strategic leadership." While the early hour is just about killing me physically, it truly is time well spent with my sisters and brothers.

Yesterday we talked about devotion. Slaughter defines devotion as, "a focused time of being fully presence to God's presence." I struggle with this understanding on a couple of levels. One, I'm not sure that I have ever been fully presence to God's presence, in fact I'm not sure I could even handle that. Maybe I am lowering the bar, but my hope and prayer is day by day I will learn to become more present to God's presence.

The other point for me is the tension I find in Slaughter’s writing compared to another book I have begun reading, Michael Frost's "Seeing God in the Ordinary: A Theology of the Everyday." While I understand the value and importance of a focused time period of Scripture study and prayer, I don't want my devotion of God to be put into the box of a daily quiet time. My deep desire is to become more aware or to use Slaughter's words, more present to God's presence in every single moment of the day.

There is a recurring line in the movie Vanilla Sky, a haunting voice that implores "open your eyes..." May it be so.

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Friday, January 20, 2006

JOINING CHRIST IN THE WORK OF RECONCILIATION

Tonight and tomorrow, our Gulf Coast Team members will be preparing for their experience by gathering together at Jumonville Conference Center outside of Uniontown. They will be learning, praying, and building connections with one another that God will leverage as they travel to the Gulf region on February 11. Even as you read these words, would you please take a moment to pray for their time together?

While I will not be traveling with them to the Gulf region, I do feel like I am a part of the team and have a role to play in partnering with them. So tomorrow morning I will arise early and trek to Jumonville (ascend the hill of the Lord) to spend time with them vision casting, encouraging, and sharing what I hope and pray will be empowering words from God.

Here's the word I am stuck on today; it's from Colossians 1:

We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God's original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels; everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body. He was supreme in the beginning and is leading the resurrection parade; he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he's there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe, people and things, animals and atoms, get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the Cross. (Colossians 1:15-23, The Message).

The reason our team is headed to the Gulf region is to join the work that Christ is already doing putting together the broken and dislocated pieces of that part of the world. How cool is that?!

And you know what - the more I think about it - we can join Christ wherever and whenever He is about His reconciling work. How cool is that?

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Monday, January 16, 2006

PRIDE (IN THE NAME OF LOVE)

For Dr. King...

One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One man come, he to justify
One man to overthrow

One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resist
One man washed on an empty beach
One man betrayed with a kiss

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love

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Saturday, January 14, 2006

SEX

Tomorrow morning our community of faith begins a seven week series on sex. It's entitled Sex and the Suburbs: Discovering God's Design for Our Sexuality. The past couple of weeks I have been very busy preparing for the series (so that's why I haven't been posting - not true) and I have to admit I am pretty pumped up. As we kick this off, let me share two thoughts, one from Scripture and the second from an awesome book by Ronald Rolheiser.

There's more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, "The two become one." Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever--the kind of sex that can never "become one." (1 Corinthians 6:16-17, The Message).

"Sexuality is the energy inside of us that works incessantly against our being alone. Sexuality is a beautiful, good, extremely powerful, sacred energy, given us by God and experienced in every cell of our being as an irrepressible urge to overcome our incompleteness, to move toward unity and consummation with that which is beyond us" (Ronald Rolheiser, A Holy Longing)

I hope you will take a moment and pray for our community as we enter this holy space. Let's all take off our shoes because the ground we are standing on is indeed holy ground and sacred space.

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