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Wednesday night’s small group was beautiful. Each person shared their introduction to God, and I want to share one with you. Luis from Juarez was the first to share and he said something like this.
“Well, I wasn’t raised in a Christian home or anything… some of my family was Catholic. I don’t know if I was a Christian or whatever, but I came to the church with my wife a couple months ago and we started coming to this group… I’ve seen God in the ways you guys help each other and have helped me. I’m really glad to be here.”
Next week, I’ll tell you about Paul from India.
This is what you do after driving 2 1/2 hours home thru a blizzard
We were ambushed by a nasty stomach bug and pounded by a late-season blizzard, but we would not be defeated! We still managed to have several fun evenings of cards and Catchphrase. We laughed until our stomachs hurt (which was nice, as opposed to hurting from repetitive puking.) Oh, and if you haven’t been introduced yet, you’ve got to check out the card game called Dutch Blitz. The front of the box calls it “A Vonderful Goot Game.” I am addicted to it, even though my sister, Jenae, beats me every single time. It’s fast-paced and exciting and maddening, and I tend to yell out demeaning comments at opponents in the heat of competition.
A Vonderful Goot Game!
Anyway, we had fun despite the forces of the universe conspiring against us.
-Jaclyn
A friend of mine – Jeri – sent me this video. It’s intriguing to me. Mostly because it shows the rapid increase of humans, technology, and information in recent times. We are truly living in an exponential era. As a church planter, I wonder how we can reach people in exponential numbers. Assuming it takes every member of the church becoming a proponent of the message of Christ, how do we train and deploy every person? Can simplifying how we do church help it grow exponentially? Perhaps Neil Cole has a good idea when he said in “Organic Church” that we should “lower the bar of how church is done and raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple.” I doubt that’s the only answer, but it seems like a decent idea.
Also, all of the inventions mentioned in the video that are exponentially growing have one thing in common… they help people. Computers help people do things they want to do. The internet helps people do things they want to do. Text messaging, myspace, facebook… they help people do things they want to do. Perhaps another question we should ask as the church is, what are we helping people do? Are we meeting a felt need? Are we introducing people to God in a way that truly helps people? If so, wouldn’t that message spread organically… exponentially?
Earlier, less nauseous time
The last time our kids were sick–vomiting sick, anyway–was in December when we were in Indiana with my folks. The time before that was at Thanksgiving when we were in Georgia at their house. And this week, while they were here visiting, both kids had the stomach flu. I’m talking prolific bouts of barfing from Saturday through Friday. Throw in one after-hours visit to the clinic and two failed attempts to give Raya an IV, and it was not the best week ever.
I teased my dad that he must be crawling with viruses that just wait until they smell my kids and then attack.
Now Marty’s feeling queasy, but hopefully it will pass after a good night’s sleep. Thank you all for your prayers.
-Jaclyn
FYI – We uploaded a few new family photos to flickr. Including Raya’s first day of skiing! Just click on the photos on the left of this page.
Have you ever realized that you can only do one thing at a time? Of course, you can walk and talk at the same time and you can read and listen to music simultaneously… but that’s because one of the things you are doing is a habit that requires no mental or physical focus. So if you are brutally honest, you begin to realize that if you tried to read a great novel and watch a spellbinding movie at the same time, you’d actually be switching your focus back and forth between media very rapidly… not actually doing them at the same time. Here’s a better article on that than I can write.
This speaks to one of the precious, limited resources we have… time. Without doing any research, I am relatively sure that there are a few resources that are simply limited… money, time, human, and natural. When you sit down to do your family budget (I’m sure you all do that), you base it on limited monetary resources. When you think through your day, week, or even year, you plan based on the limited amount of time you have. There are also human resources… basically the sum of someone’s abilities and their time given to those abilities. And lastly, we are all well aware of the limited natural resources in our universe.
Therefore, if you can only do one thing at a time and you have a limited amount of time to do things, the question is obvious… what are you doing with your time? But what if you discovered one day that you were going to live forever? What if time was no longer a limited resource? What if you discovered a limitless resource that was unnatural? Wouldn’t that change the question? It has for me.
Since I sincerely beleive that I will live forever, my question has changed from what will I do with my time, to what is the best use of my time? And since I believe that my creator knows me best and therefor knows what would be the best use of my time, the quest is no longer for more limited resources, but a quest to know and do what my creator desires for me to do. In other words, if I could simply listen to God’s voice and do what He says, then whatever I spend time doing is exactly what is best. And when I’ve found myself in that rare position, what a peaceful place it is.
Therefore the best question is, what is God telling me to do? For now, God is challenging me to refocus on what has been called The Great Commission where Jesus said, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And – for me – that means discipling men one at a time.
What’s the one thing God wants you doing? Can you hear His voice? Are you having trouble obeying?
While enjoying an ice cold Coke for breakfast at Village Inn this morning, my biology-teacher friend and I uncovered a question… What would it be like if discipleship was less lecture and more lab? I mean, I’ve sat in church nearly every Sunday for the past 23 years… it’s a darn good thing I’m an auditory learner or I wouldn’t have gotten much out of it. It’s generally accepted that there are three major learning types: Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic. And every good teacher knows that more students are more likely to retain the lesson if it is experienced in every learning type. And yet, the typical Sunday service is primarily auditory. I know, I know, we throw in an occasional movie clip or something to help illustrate the point, but if you had to make a pie chart of time dedicated to each learning style, I imagine the run-away winner would be auditory.
You know what would be interesting… comparing the ratio of auditory learners in the church with the auditory learners in the general public. In other words, I wonder if many people leave the church simply because they aren’t engaged as a learner. To put it another way, I wonder if more auditory learners stay in the church than other learners.
Back to the real question… what if we went beyond auditory and visual? What if we involved kinesthetic learners and learned by doing? After all, you can’t teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar. I can tell you as a past youth pastor that those students that went beyond observational learning into participating grew in their understanding and application of Jesus much more than their observing counterparts. And those that engaged in emotionally charged ministries like mission trips and service projects came home different. They didn’t just learn… they changed.
So how can I apply this in a discipleship driven church? If someone came to you today and asked you to disciple them – help them to become like Jesus – what would you do? How would you teach them? Would it be a lecture or a lab? How would you engage all three learning types? It seems obvious that Jesus did this a ton… how would you do it in the modern, suburbian world?
The good news is, we had a coupon for a free Redbox rental, so we’re only out 2 hours of our lives and not any cash.
I knew nothing about this movie going into it; I only found out afterward that it’s based on a video game. (Bad sign.) This movie employs every tired, worn out plot device there is. Even if you haven’t seen Max Payne, you’ve seen it–and done much better.
Max is a cold case cop who’s been obsessed for a long time (months? years? it’s never made clear) with finding the murderer of his wife and baby. He has a storage unit filled with boxes of files on the case. But he must be the lousiest detective in the history of movie detectives, because he is taken by surprise by two different clues that are blatantly obvious to the viewer the first time we see them. That’s about all we know about Max, except that he likes to do lame voiceovers that try to sound deep (“I don’t believe in heaven. But I do believe in angels.”)
The plot is pretty indecipherable, but it has something to do with an addictive, hallucinogenic drug that either kills you or makes you invincible. Except it doesn’t really make you invincible. And it makes you see these dark, winged, pseudo-angel things, which may kill you or may be on your side; it’s hard to say. And in some scenes they seem like hallucinations, and in others they seem real. Confused? So was I.
The director seems to think that a cohesive storyline is expendable as long as you throw in a couple scenes in super-slow-mo. Super-slow-mo makes everything cool, you know. Like when Max shoots the villain at the end. Oops, I gave away the ending. I’d add a spoiler alert if there were anything to spoil. The villain was supposed to be a surprise, but you see it coming from the earliest scenes. The villain also gives one of the worst villain monologues I’ve ever heard.
Finally, I take issue with the movie’s PG13 rating. There’s some foul language, one scene of near-nudity, and the body count has to be pushing 30 by the end. (In his quest for revenge, Max leaves quite a wake of collateral damage.)
Just a note: we watched the theatrical version, not the unrated director’s cut. But I assure you, adding more scenes can only make this movie an even bigger pile of steaming poo.
Twice this week, my good friend Dick and I walked our neighborhoods while praying together. Yes, we prayed aloud… Yes, it was a little awkward. But it was worth it! Lately my soul has been burning for our neighbors, but I’ve never exactly been a prayer warrior. But the Lord has been speaking to Dick as well and I figured I could learn a thing or two, so we started by getting on our faces in his house and begging God to show up and show us what to do. Then we just left the house and started praying. We prayed for salvation, reconciliation, passion, forgiveness, and mostly for God’s vision. If we could only see with His eyes… maybe we’d pray our guts out every day for those who are far from God.
Would you take a prayer walk with me? I’ve put my house in the street view of google maps in this article. Begin by praying for my family. Pray for our marriage to stay strong and grow even deeper in the knowledge and love of God. Pray for our needs to be met and no more. Pray for God to reveal himself to us in fresh, new ways. Then simply click around my block like you’re taking a walk and pray. Pray whatever the Spirit leads. And please pray for God to build bridges between us and our neighbors. In Matthew 16:18, Jesus said, “…I will build my church…” Pray that he would start on our block.
If you took the few minutes to do this virtual prayer walk, please comment at least letting us know. If you sensed Jesus speaking to you, please share! Thanks.
If you didn’t see THIS ARTICLE, it’s worth a good skim. It doesn’t shock me. Not because I’ve done the research myself or because I’m the Yoda of religion, but because here in the west, we live among the “Nones” every day. They are the people who – for whatever reason – have chosen no religious affiliation whatsoever. Yes, some of them are hard line atheist or agnostic, but I would say most of them are simply turned off by what they perceive religion has to offer. They have found that they can live a fairly virtuous, guilt-free, gratifying life without the hypocracy, judgementalism, and politics of the church. Is there a day coming when Christ will reveal his true identity through a new group of people that proactively engage in loving not with word or tongue, but in action and in truth, live in meaninful discipleship, and worship in Spirit and in Truth?
Here’s another article – yes, this is a two-for-one deal – drastic times call for drastic measures. Is this guy a nut case or a crack shot? You decide. Read it and comment… I’ll respond.
