I Still Can't Sleep

I still can't sleep or sit still for more than a few minutes. I was awake until 7:30 this morning. I've had insomnia for as long as I can remember, but it only happens every once in awhile, and this feels different. I still feel that burning sense of purpose in my chest and I can't quiet myself down long enough to relax. I'm too excited about church and life and the vision that God has given me for me to rest. I know I need to sleep, but short of sleeping pills, I really don't know what I can do. Anyway, I'm not complaining! I like staying awake and getting stuff done. I'm reading twelve books at once right now and I'm stoked about what God is teaching me. I haven't been able to truly learn anything for awhile. I've been in school too long to learn. School isn't as much about learning as it is about paperwork and professor-pleasing. I believe that learning is a lifelong process and as a pastor, I need to be a constant student. Someone once said that you must teach from a running stream rather than a stagnant pool. I believe that you absolutely cannot teach what you do not learn. I need to constantly be learning something or I have nothing to offer anyone. Anyway, that's my thought for the day.

Cocaine: The Ultimate Ministry Tool

(the title's for you Jin)

Jeremiah 20:9 But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.

I woke up this morning feeling like like someone pumped me full of speed. I literally bounced out of bed with all the energy in the world pumping through my heart. I went for a run, pumped some weights grabbed an americano(single shot instead of my usual double) and drove to San Leandro for a meeting. It's midnight and I still have that wired feeling going on...I think it started on Saturday night and hasn't really stopped since. Back when I was serious about music, I would have an idea for a song and it would eat at me from the inside out. I'd have this burning desire to complete this song that I could feel inside of me and I couldn't rest until I got it all out. Sometimes I'd stay up all through the night writing lyrics and working out the chorus, the bridge the verses and arranging the parts until it was perfect and I could let it go. I feel that way now, except it's about church and God's word. I feel like I have so much that I need to preach and teach and if I don't get it just right it will eat away at me until I explode. I'm excited! (if you couldn't tell) I can identify with Jeremiah's statement...I can't bear holding it in.

Sappy blog.

So it's been awhile since my last post. In that time, a few things have happened. The biggest and best being that I am now engaged to the love of my life. That in itself is worthy of a moment of silence. If some of you who are reading this know me from long ago, you know that for me allowing myself to love someone was an issue for me. I dated a "few" people here and there but I never even came close to any sort of real commitment. I had given up my dream of finding someone who had everything I was looking for in a person. I didn't think that she existed and that I would have to settle for something less, but it turns out she really did exist....she was just hiding in Canada. (it's the last place you look y'know.) Alright....the sap is getting to me now.

I Studied Myself Stupid.

So at this moment I am sitting in Greek Class. I should be studying and listening and all that, but i've been here in this class for three hours and frankly I just don't give a damn anymore. If one's brain could actually ache, I'm feeling it right now. I started studying greek yesterday from 8pm to 3am. This morning, I drove to starbucks, had a coffee for the first time in months, and proceeded to study more greek for six hours, at which point I went to class an hour early to take a make-up quiz. When I sat down to take the quiz, everything I had learned over the last few days instantly flew from my brain and this annoying dull ache replaced all of the precious nominative/accusative/possesive forms I had spent hours memorizing. I'm so tired.

We need to get over ourselves!!!!

This semester at seminary I'm taking a class in Spiritual Direction. Being that I was raised Southern Baptist, I am familiar with two types of personal pastoral ministry: Pastoral Counseling and Discipling. While Counseling seeks to help/heal/fix/prevent and Discipling aims to teach/instruct/model/mentor....Spiritual Direction is an ancient practice that is slowly making its way back into the realm of Protestant ministerial practice. There are a plethora of definitions for Spiritual Direction, but here are the two that I feel most adequately represents it: Spiritual Direction "takes place when two people agree to give their full attention to what God is doing in one, or both of their lives and seek to respond in faith..."(Eugene Peterson). The second definition is more pointed toward the relationship of spiritual direction in the believer. Jeanette Bakke, in her book Holy Invitations writes "Spiritual Direction is a way to give caring attention to our relationship with God--attention that is focused on life's foundations underneath ordinary busyness. We offer ourselves and our hopes and fears to God in an openness that affirms our intention to listen,.....[when] we take time to listen intentionally to the Holy Spirit, our actions have the potential of becoming truer expressions of who God has created and called us to be. In this way, contemplation and action become a unified whole..."
All of the above is a segue into what I really want to vent about...while I think that spiritual direction, contemplation, soul-searching and the like are invaluable components of the Christian faith experience, I think many have taken it too far. Too many christians today find every reason they can to only concern themselves with their own walk with God and nothing more. I am constantly frustrated and pained by the number of people I encounter on a daily basis who think that Christianity is all about them and their own walk with God. Our faith is not a two-way relationship!!! It's not just us and God, it's us, God and others!!! If you really want to see God's activity in your life...serve someone! If you want to understand the character of God...then WHAT MATTERS TO GOD SHOULD MATTER TO YOU!!!! God cares about people, not just some people, all people...yeah, sure, we as baptists have the whole Calvinism/Arminian/double-election/God's chosen debate going on....y'know what....it doesn't matter! You as a follower of Christ, no matter what you believe about election, have an obligation to serve everyone and should have a burning desire...a pain in your heart that can't go away....to see people come to know Christ as their Lord and Savior. We as the church have turned what should have been a hospital for the sick and dying into a sanctuary/fortress for the "well" the "healed." You are not well or healed! Not by any means! In many ways, given the current spiritual health of Western Christendom, you and I as the church are worse off on the inside than those on the out You are saved! You still have sin!!!!!! You're no better than anyone else!!! The only worth that we have is the fact the God in His amazing benevolent, mind-boggling, love beyond reason kind of way humbled and sacrificed Himself to the point of a mocking death on a cross in order that you and I could spend eternity with Him.
I meet seminary students all the time that tell me that they don't really have a goal or calling in ministry. They have come to seminary, a place where people are trained in MINISTRY LEADERSHIP, that they are not really sure what they want to do, but seminary is a good place for personal enrichment/spiritual growth.........if you want personal enrichment...a life-changing, mindset-altering, worldview shaping experience of faith in the presence of God...join in His activity....find where He is at and go to town serving Him. I don't care if you do it as a pastor, teacher, evangelist, missionary, small-group leader, spiritual mentor, workplace witness, whatever...if you do it for the glory of God based on His call on your life...you will have an experience greater than any book you can read, class you can take, devotion you can complete or sermon you can listen to. David Augsberger wrote a book called Dissident Discipleship. His main point it that our faith has focused on what he calls a be-polar spirituality: God and us. How we can love God, and how God loves us. He portends that the only hope for Christianity in a post-modern world is to abandon the bi-polar mindset in favor of a "tri-polar" spirituality. God, us, and others. I agree wholeheartedly with his prediction, because it seems as if in the rest of the world, the church is flourishing, growing, experiencing God in an amazing way, and yet the western church, with its self-seeking, self-focused, self-righteous idea of our relationship with God has become a modern-day Israel. We spend all of our time worried about appeasing the law of God, maintaining purity and hoping that we can draw people into our little synagogues and temples with our amazing righteousness. In truth though...we really only want people like us to show up....outsiders can fend for themselves. It breaks my heart to think that we have treated the sacrifice of Christ to selfishly. We have taken the divine and made it human and trivial. We have taken the blood of Christ, shed for all....and we have laid claim to it, as our own personal right, rather than a gift given to be shared.
As I get ready to dig deeper into Spiritual Direction, I hope and pray that we will not spend too much time focused on an "inward journey," but rather we will seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit in directing our paths, and not our own inner desires or motivations. We as Christians say we want God's presence, we want personal revival, we want depth of faith etc. If we really want that, we need to find the presence of God, we have to seek Him wholeheartedly in the way that he want us to seek Him. Matthew 10:39 says "... anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." He said it again in Matt 16:24-25 "Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it "Brothers and sisters, we should abandon ourselves for the sake of others, we should foget about our own needs and worry about the heartache and pain that others are going through. In serving others, we serve God, in the way that He commanded us. He told us that two commands were greater than all the rest: love and obey God with all our hearts, body, soul and to love others as ourselves. He said that the whole of the law, the entirety of God's commands could be summed up in this: love one another. (Romans 13:8-10)
When we seek to follow Christ, we should follow the Father in the way that He did....all the way to a cross.

Why do we do church the way we do?

Who decided that as a church, we have to meet in a building, we have to have a worship service followed by an offering, followed by a sermon, followed by whatever? On the recommendation of a friend I ordered a book that apparently traces the history of how and why we (as far as mainline Christianity) do church the way we do church. I'm excited about reading it because I've always wondered when the traditions of Christianity came into play. I mean, I understand the basic stuff...many of our current traditions(baptism/communion/worship) were all shaped during the Reformation in response to the Catholic way of doing things. But even the Catholic way of doing things has changed over the years to resemble more of a Protestant mindset. If you take a look at a contemporary Benedictine service, I'll bet you that it looks more radically Protestant than did Luther, Calvin or Zwingli's services! in our culture today, many of the so-called "emergent" churches have services that more closely resemble a medieval Catholic service than an Evangelical Protestant one. But seriously, who decided that we should take an offering? Who was the first person to put kneeling benches in front of their pulpit? Who decided to build a pulpit? Did Jesus use one? Did Jesus practice exegesis? Did the disciples take an offering after their services at Antioch? Who was the first youth minister? Who decided that worship should go before a sermon and not after? Did the early christians wear their "best Sunday clothes" to church, or did they wear whatever? These are the things I wish to know...

The Adventure Begins!

Most of the people I have met in California seem to really love blogging and have been hounding me to do it, so finally after much consternation...I've given in. I was never good with writing out what I think about things in general. Maybe for a class paper or reflection assignment, but not just to write it out for the heck of it. When I was a kid, I'd try to start a journal to keep track of things going on, but i'd usually write in it a few times each day for about a week and then I'd forget about and eventually chuck it in the trash. I guess I've never liked leaving a written record of my thoughts. I like people, community, friends, openness and all that but as far as my private life goes...i'm not a huge fan of complete disclosure. These last few months however, God has really been working on my heart and I've come to see that maybe I need to open up fully to people, especially since that's what i've been asking all of my church members to do. You can't take people where you're not going. So, after some inward searching, I've come to the conclusion that unless I'm completely transparent with my congregation, I've no business expecting them to be tranparent with one another or with me. So there it is.
The main reason I'm doing this is to have another avenue of communication with the people who matter most to me, particularly those of you in RBC with me. I hope that through this, we will be able to learn more about one another and to become more of the unified community that I know He wants us to be.

Cheers.