Why are we so surprised when we see God at work? It is true isn’t it? God is at work all around us, and yet we fail to engage what he is doing and try to manipulate and start our own stuff. Just last night I am sitting at home watching the good ol’ TV when my 8 year old Kate says, “Dad I want to get baptized!” My reaction was one of total surprise as I responded, “Who talked to you about being baptized?” Like it was a bad word and that some how she was signing up for an occult. Of course, she responded, “At Church…”  Once I regained my composure and got rid of my prideful self saying, “why didn’t she hear it from me, or learn it from me.” I had a very proud moment and acknowledged that God is at work even though I didn’t manipulate it, start it, or control it.

Are you surprised when someone is healed, when someone receives salvation, or a simple prayer is answered? Why? As believers why can we not rest in the fact that God is at work all around us, he loves us, and wants the best for us? My best advice in engaging adventure in this life is look around you and see where God is at work and join in and stop trying to manipulate, start, and control something just because you want your fingerprints on it. It will never be all it can be with your mark anyway.

So where is God at work in your life, home, and community? Are you joining in or pridefully staying at arms length?

I have watched this video over and over. One guy, made one decision, that changed a whole community. Check it out and then decide what decisions you make that have the potential to change a whole community.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNn7SXAyuhQ

Are you a consumer or contributer? As in the words of my good friend Chris King. Now go and try something different. Have a blessed week….

One of my favorite authors is Barbar Brown Taylor.  She was named one of the top 20 preachers in America.  A few years ago she wrote a very honest memoir of her decision to leave her role as pastor called Leaving Church.  She is a person who was willing to ask the hard questions and see where the path would take her.  I resonate with her conclusion:

“I thought that being faithful was about becoming somone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.”

This deeply reflective author bring to us some wonderful questions to consider about our communities of faith and self.  This weeks installment of Walking with Questions calls us to stop and ponder the type of communities and relationships that we are a part of and are creating:

“What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are suppose to believe?  What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church?  What if church felt more like a way station than a destination?  What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?”

What if we could listen more?  What if we had the courage of Barbara to unlearn what we think we know rather than continuing to look for things that confirm what we already think?

I am convinced that Jesus dealt in mess more than he dealt with the nice and neat. I am also convinced that He called his Church to mess instead of the nice and neat. Yet, how would you feel if you caught your pastor hanging out at the local bar or casino? Maybe worse, what if he/she where spending time with Tiger Woods or Obama right now? A few years back I got to meet with a pretty high profile Christian author/speaker. (sorry I don’t like to name drop…)  When I asked him about meeting with President Clinton during his scandal with Monica Lewinsky he said, “The most amazing part about it was how the Christian church responded to me trying to help the President through his mess.” Needless to say their response erred on the side of judgement instead of encouragement.

Why is this? In Mark 2:17,  Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” How many of our lives and how many of our churches are concentrating on the righteous more than the sick? How many of us turn a nose to the sick because they are messy, but feel very comfortable sitting in our churches with the righteous? How many of us have become Pharisees? On the outside we say the right things, do the right things, and hang-out with the right people yet inside we are full of ourselves. I am guilty as charged! In fact, I hate this about myself. I am a selfish nose turner that loves the comfort of my chair (not my pew, we are to contemporary for those…) in my church. I have become to comfortable.

So here are the tough questions I must ask myself and ask you… 1) If Christ called us to the sick then why are hanging out with the righteous? 2) Are we hanging-out in the right places? 3) How would you feel if your pastor were caught hanging out in a bar or casino?

P.S. — Pastor Dave if you are reading this I would applaud your efforts in reaching people for Christ. In fact, I might just join you….

The journey is about two things.  One getting to know yourself in a clearer way without all the props and distractions we put around ourselves to hold us up.  But the second reason is the most important I believe, to learn to ask different questions.  We do this by coming into contact with people and places that we have never encountered.  The very act of walking into the unknown empowers the ability to question or at least encounter uncertainty which is a prerequisite for asking good questions.  Perhaps our most important life long adventure is to ask better questions.  It is our ability to ask questions that will release us from what we think we know in order to be open to what we could know.

For the next few posts I am going to introduce some people who have made me ask different questions in my life.  I will offer some of their perspective in hopes that you will go and engage them more fully on your own.  The companions you invite into your journey will make all the difference in both the way of the journey and destination you are likely to reach.

So, here we go…

“Christianity is the proclamation of the end of religion, not of a new religion, or even of the best of all possible religions.  And therefore if the cross is the sign of anything, it’s the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all the world’s problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing.  What the cross is actually a sign of is the fact that religion can’t do a thing about the world’s problems—that is it never did work and it never will…” Robert Capon – The Mystery of Christ and Why We Don’t Get It

What is beyond religion?  What would my life be like if I let go of religion?  What do I think I need to do to gain the acceptance of God?

This weekend my wife and I were in Kansas City, MO on a business adventure. We decided to stay an extra night, since my parents had our kids, and we actually got to go watch a movie by ourselves. We picked Alice in Wonderland mainly because it was at the IMAX, in 3-D, and because Johnny Depp is a little bit creepy. Can I get an amen to that? We’ll I won’t ruin the movie, but there was one particular part that has stuck in my brain. Towards the end of the movie Alice must get a special sword and slay a dragon. She contemplates the action and comes back saying, “I just can’t do it, I cannot kill the dragon.” After making this statement she’s runs into a wise old blue caterpillar named Absolem, who is a chain smoker by the way. He makes a statement to Alice that I am processing. He said, “The sword knows what to do, you just need to hang on…”

Don’t you think that it works that way with us and God? I mean we all have a calling, a purpose, and identity but we continue to come back and like Alice say, “I just can’t do it, I just can’t let go!” All while God is saying, “I have your purpose and know what I want you to do, just hang on.” We all have adventure in our DNA. God made us that way. We aren’t to sit on the sidelines and let life pass us by we are to act. A very familiar scripture comes to my mind in thinking through this. Jeremiah 29:11 says, “I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” If he knows the plan then what are we doing interfering with it? I know for me it is because I don’t want to lose control. His way looks like a slippery slope at times and my way looks much safer and secure.

Let go today! Do something bold that he wants you to do instead of playing it safe on the sidelines. Get in the game! Oh, and by the way if you do see a chain smoking, fat, blue, talking caterpillar along the way you better listen….. Have a great week..

Some time ago, I was reading through the announcements at my church.  Something stood out to me.  If I participated with everything that applied to me, I would have come to eight to ten meetings to talk about God and the Bible.  It seems that we have come to spend much of our time in our communities of faith talking about faith. There is a world of difference between hearing a truth and experiencing a truth. 

 There is a  passage in John’s first letter that calls us to reach beyond talking about our faith and actually experience it as we love others.  But to do so, we must begin in a very paradoxical place. 

             “My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love.  This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality.  It’s also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it.  For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves.  And friends, once that’s taken care of and we’re no longer accusing our condemning ourselves, we’re gold and free before God!  We’re able to stretch our hands out and receive… (I John 3:18-22, The Message).

 The place we must begin to live in our faith is being honest with ourselves.  John reminds us that what limits us most is our own doubt and insecurity about ourselves. Our fear keeps us from reaching out, from fully engaging those around us, from really experiencing the grace that has been extended to us. 

 Too often we come to our churches wrestling with our own shortcomings.  We worry they will be revealed.  We worry that we do not measure up.  We too often come thinking we are here to prove something.  I wonder if John, as he was writing this passage, thought of another scene many years before when Jesus was on bended knee beginning to wash the feet of his friend Peter.  Peter struggled with believing the mystery of grace.  He did not want to be served.  He did not feel worthy.  And that is the point.  When we are worried about our worth we cannot receive the love and acceptance that Jesus freely extends to us and we cannot pass that love on to those around us.

 We are asked to come and trust what cannot possibly be true.  We are asked to trust that eating a little piece of bread and drinking a small sip of wine brings life to our spirit.  We are asked to believe that no matter what we bring in terms of our state of faith, God has already seen and known this.  It does not stop him from loving us.

 So as you reach out and consider the people around you, consider that reaching as a reminder that all has been made right for us with God and if we trust it, with each other.  There is more going on than we can understand.  Our job is not to explain it only to trust it.  As we receive what we can see, bread and wine, trust that we are also receiving what we cannot see – unconditional acceptance. When we truly trust this we will no longer live separated and divided.  We will live at ease with God and our neighbor and that will change the world.

I don’t know about you, but growing up I heard the words “Just Try Harder” often from coaches, teachers, and my parents. You see I was the average kid that was OK at a lot of things but not necessarily a stud at anything. Therefore, instead of batting 2nd or 3rd in the line-up I batted 8th or 9th. You see I could play but not at the level I or others wanted. Therefore, I was sent on a mission to “Try Harder”. I spent hours at the batting cage, watched my all-time favorite player Ozzie Smith over and over, I would listen to coaches and my dad, but it never really clicked. One day the baseball coach from our local high school came and watched my team practice and caught eye of me getting frustrated in hitting the ball. He watched, observed, then approached me and simply took my front foot and moved it out more opening up my stance. This way I could see the ball with both eyes instead one. (Who knew a few months later I would be fitted for glasses?) First pitch? It went sailing..

Seth Godin, one of my favorite authors wrote this about “Trying Harder”:

“The usual mantra is to ‘try harder’. Trying harder is impossible when you’re already trying as hard as you can.

But you can always try different.

Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

If it’s not working, harder might not be the answer.”  

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/03/try-different.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+typepad/sethsmainblog+(Seth’s+Blog)

I just wonder if this might be true of us and our desire to follow Christ? I know even in my own spirituality I have been counseled to just try harder. Our churches have tried harder to be relevant and reach more people using contemporary services, meeting in coffee shops, creating movements and more. But what if trying harder doesn’t work? Maybe it is time to try something different!

Any suggestions?

Pilgrimage is one of my new passions.  It first got my attention when I read a book by Paul Boers — The Way is Made by Walking.  It was his reflections on walking the 500 mile Camino De Santiago route in Spain.  When I read it, I heard the urge to go for a long walk.

Boers defines pilgrimage as “religiously motivated travel for the purpose of meeting and experiencing God with hopes of being shaped and changed by the encounter.”  This was my hope this summer as I set off for Melrose, Scotland with my daughter.  Our 65 mile walk took us through many villages, past castles and abbeys.  We began and ended on two of the most famous Celtic thin places (places where it seems the phyical and spiritual worlds are closer and there is a history of interaction with God in those places).  I did not know what to expect from a thin place.  Would I hear a voice?  Would I get ideas that I had not before known?  The answer is I experienced a deep emotional openness and peace.  The night before we started our walk, we were in Melrose whose abbey was just a few feet away from our bed and breakfast.  I woke up in the middle of the night with a longing to return to a place that I had not yet left.  As I read my journal now, the question I had then was “Is this what the relationship God has called me to?  Nothing spectacular, simply a place to sit and rest?

For me, the pilgrimage is a place to find healing in the ordinary.  I can do nothing each day but put one foot in front of the other until I finish my days task.  I cannot change my circumstance only contiue on as the path leads me.   Each day I am given resurrection as my sleep turns my tiredness and brokenness into strength for another day.  I started our journey with a deep sadness and a hope for an encounter.  I ended with healing and peace.  The encounter was not spectacular or awe inspiring.  It was a stillness that came from the walk.  I continue each day to yearn for my next walk and just maybe another day in Melrose.

Where are you going?  What do you wish to encounter?  What adventure would bring you peace? Have you taken a pilgrimage? What is it about this experience that grips my heart and changes me?

I hope to this point I have gotten many of you to think about service and generosity to the point where you feel overwhelmed. To ask the tough questions like: “How do I do all of this?” “How do I keep my eyes open to see the needs around me and respond?” “Why am I so selfish?” Let me bring some guidance along the way.

The is no doubt each and everyday there are hurts, social injustices, and pain all around us. So how do we really help? We also see catastrophes like Katrina, Haiti, 9/11, and so on. How do we help? Do we get so overwhelmed we don’t do anything? This past Sunday we had a couple of families leaving for Thailand to work with young women in the sex trade industry. There is something that Kelly said that has stuck with me. “What do you burn for?”  She said, “find what you burn for and do it…”

Let me ask you! Do you burn for anything? Something so strong that you would leave everything behind to pursue it?  If not, why not? Do our neighborhoods burn for anything? Do our churches burn for anything? The lost, the poor, the sick, the naked, the hungry? I have a feeling that we all have no idea what we burn for so therefore we throw money at things that come our way, go on mission trips, serve in soup kitchens so that we feel better about ourselves as people and sadly enough as Christians. So instead of serving out of our God given passion and gifts we serve out of duty. So how is that working for you?

If you feel lost in the area of engaging or struggling with your identity and purpose than I ask, “what do you burn for?” If you know than focus on it. Andy Stanley in many of his books says, “do less for more”. If you focus the impact will be greater. Reality is we have so many organizations and ministries that have no clue what God wants them to do so they throw the kitchen sink at it and hope something sticks. Then we sit back and wonder why we are not being effective. I know strongly enough that people don’t want to be involved in something that doesn’t make a difference or is stagnant. If you don’t know what you burn for go out and serve and educate yourself. Find something you believe in and want to impact and go for it.

What do you burn for?