thrive community

Grace. What a powerful word. It’s even more powerful to those who understand the depth of its meaning from personal experience. The great exchange where weary souls can finally rest.

It is finished. Three beautiful words. They, too are words of rest but are also words of beauty that, once understood, will release joy and worship. The great exchange where weary souls are finally free.

Rest and freedom are the fruit of a life that understands the “good news” that Jesus spoke of. For some reason, the fruit of the “good news” in most churches actually looks like bad news. I know the words are spoken the same, but the end result in their parishioners lives looks nothing like rest and freedom.

You see, most people who profess to follow Jesus are not really free. There is an unconscious enslavement to a lifestyle of “proving their worthiness to God” and have yet to realize they don’t need to anymore.

What we don’t realize is that God is more excited about this idea than we are (Eph. 1:5). Yet our tendency is to keep working to get His “thumbs up” for our inferior attempts so that, by some means, we can get Him to like us more. We are enamored and distracted by our own efforts, hoping they will draw God’s favorable attention, all the while He’s trying to get our attention by pointing to the cross.

What we have here is a failure to communicate, and I don’t think God is the one who needs a better hearing aid on this one.

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Following Jesus means that you’ve signed up for a life-long journey of change. It’s a relationship that will directly confront your character, conduct and calling for the rest of your life.

We all go through different seasons of our lives where change comes easy and the outcomes are seamless and painless. It runs in parallel with who we are, what we desire to do and we are able to live happily with it. But other seasons of change are hard to endure under the weight and pressure it places on our life. The confrontation of change can be harsh, debilitating and deadly, especially when it comes to the issues that lie deep in our soul.

I’ve been dealing with a season of change as of late, not because I’ve been confronted by it, but because I sought it out first. My wife and I have been going to counseling for a few months. We’re going, not because we have a bad marriage, but because we want our good marriage to be even better. The longing of our hearts is to have uninhibited intimacy and are willing to fight for the heart of each other and fight for our own heart to be free and full so that we can love each other the way God intended with full acceptance, full emotion for each other and with full trust. But the freedom we desire comes at a price we must be willing to pay.

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I met with a few people today who are interested in being small group leaders. It was refreshing to hear their hearts as well as their different perspectives on what they see as ministry. Our goal as a church is to help people get freed up to be themselves and help them to see how they can serve others with their gifts and passions, where they are.

Leah is helping us create a singles group. After our official, “blessing of the pastor” meeting, we got a chance to talk with her and get to know her a little better. She grew up Catholic and didn’t even think she would ever be back in church. She’s growing in her walk with Christ and has a great passion to create a family for single people and help them belong. As she shared her story, I could hardly keep still, or quiet for that matter. God was stirring me and encouraging me as she shared about her journey, her coming to Jesus and following after His call.

As you might have known, I started jabbering away. Being around an excited Christ follower with a willing heart and a blossoming faith is like smoking crack to this preacher man (though, I, myself have not tried it but I hope the religious people will follow my analogy without legalistic judgement!). I would rather be around a raw, vibrant, passionate Believer than a settled, bland pretender who can talk a good game of Bible trivia, does “Church” well, but their life shout out to the world around them with a resounding…”BORING!”

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Opening Day of baseball is a day I try not to miss. I’ve not been able to attend the past few years but I try to be involved, either by watching it on TV or catching the highlights on the evening news. Memorial Day is a special day as well. Watching the parades, listening to patriotic music and getting the chance to say “thank you” to all of our military is truly wonderful. There’s something deeper to these moments for me.

For one, participating with thousands of others singing the National Anthem is a very emotional thing. Then, comes the loud, powerful roar of the F-16′s as they fly over the stadium with precision timing and formation. Screaming and clapping are our best attempt to join this awe inspiring moment.

I get to live in the greatest country on the planet (in my humble opinion) and have a deep sense of gratitude for all that this country has given me. I’ve always been amazed at the level of sacrifice that millions of our soldiers have made to protect, defend and honor our country. The greatest expression of love is when someone lays their live down for the sake of someone else (John 15:13). It reminds me of the greater calling of every person to live for others and something bigger than themselves. It’s the way of Jesus.

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I’m a nostalgic person at heart. I hold on to things and enjoy recalling the stories that go with them, especially things that center around experiences I’ve had with people. They represent a connection that has seemed to bind us together on a deeper level. It’s the creation of stories and having people who know your stories. 

Everybody wants to be known, to feel included and to be connected. Take FaceBook and Twitter for example. These social networks were created out of an incredible need that people have to know people and be known by others, even on the most trivial of levels. People share who they are, give updates on what they are currently doing, share photos, join affinity groups and discover new people to be connected with. FaceBook has an estimated two hundred million users while the newly established Twitter has attracted over fourteen million users in the U.S. alone and is rapidly growing.

Knowing someone goes beyond the cognitive and the informative to the intimate and the spiritual. It’s a divine experience that comes from engaging our heart with another human being. But offering insights ABOUT you is different than offering experiences WITH you. It’s how we move from the fictional person we want others to think we are to the person we are in reality. It’s where “knowing” genuinely happens.

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A spiritual mentoring relationship can be like no other you’ll ever have, but finding one can be a very challenging task, especially when you don’t know where to begin.

We all need someone to learn from, to be a sounding board for decisions and to help us see our potential. The growing desire for someone further along in the faith to encourage us, teach us and give us guidance in life is easy to detect, but the hard part is discovering who a spiritual mentor could be or should be.

It’s vitally important that you find someone who is able and willing to do life with you. But there’s more to it than just what your mentor will bring to the table. It involves what you bring to the relationship as well.

The greater search is to discover what this relationship will require of you. A healthy mentoring relationship is a two-way connection of giving and taking, investing as well as receiving. Expectations will flow both ways so you and your mentor have a great deal of searching to do and clarifications to make.

Here are a few things to think about as you begin this process…

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I received a phone call yesterday from my mentor, Steve Smothers concerning a friend of mine from high school. He called to inform me that my friends husband had committed suicide and that he would be doing the funeral the next day. Steve had been our youth pastor and we all deeply enjoyed those days together. I could tell that Steve was feeling the impact of the situation and could hear his concern for our friend in his voice. This was a tragedy beyond one person taking his life. The impact has yet to be realized.

Many people contemplate taking their own life yet never follow through. I would be one of them. But God used the circumstances surrounding my life at that time to bring me to faith in Christ. It’s hard for me to fathom the depths of pain that someone must feel and the hopelessness that stirs in a person’s soul that would influence them to follow through with such a life altering decision. But the truth remains that there is still healing and hope available to every person, no matter how dark things may seem.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve last written. The busyness of life, ministry and writing has been exhaustive to say the least. Other priorities have taken a front seat and pushed their way forward, though uninvited. But this situation has stirred my heart and I felt that I had to write about it. Things concerning life and death seem to take the drivers seat when they arise. Everything else suddenly takes a back seat and the priority of people makes us step on the brake, rightly bringing our active life to a halt. The eternal interrupts the temporal and the search for meaning and significance reemerges from our soul once again.

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So many Christ followers are looking for a spiritual family to help them. There is a desperate need for spiritually mature men and women to mentor young Christians, helping them to clarify what really matters in life.

I am amazed at how many new Christians don’t have anyone to turn to for encouragement, support, counsel and teaching. God intended for his people to be like a family. It’s very clear from Scripture that family relationships are the primary catalyst to life learning and transformation (Deut. 6:4-8)(Eph. 6:4). But instead of helping new believers become rooted and established in healthy relationships, most churches place the major emphasis on programs, attending services, Bible studies, church events, or other ministries.

Don’t get me wrong. These environments are necessary and important for Christ followers to receive needed Biblical education and be exposed to the many essential concepts concerning their faith in Jesus, but God’s primary “delivery system” for life transformation and discipleship is best initiated and sustained through personal relationships. Nothing can take the place and fill the void that every human being has for authentic relationships. We assume they will happen naturally, but they don’t.

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We’ve all been here before. It’s that moment when we realize there’s more to life than just getting by. If you’ve never been here before, then you probably have no ambition of ever becoming a constructive human being or accomplishing anything significant in your life like a lazy 30 year-old dude, still living at home with his parents, doesn’t have a job, is a predictable mooch and lives from one excuse to another, justifying his pathetic existence of blogging militantly from his bunk-bed in between playing World of Warcraft with his virtual 15 year-old friend, Hans in Denmark on X-Box Live.

If this describes you, then you are officially a loser and I offer you this counsel: Shut down your computer right now, apologize to your parents for being a loser, take a shower, put on something besides your pajama’s and crocs and go get a job. At this point, in the ‘loser continuum,’ any job will do! (Can you tell I’ve had to give this counsel before?)

For the rest of us, we are probably at a different kind of crossroad. I would guess that most people are looking beyond the path of least resistance to the road of greatest influence. That’s where I am, too.

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Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last few decades, you’ve noticed that communication has drastically changed. We are living in the most connected generation in history with access to more people and information than ever before. It’s a global community that everyone wants to be a part of.

From the telegraph, to the telephone, the television, the Apple 1, the cell phone, the fax machine, the ARPA-net, the world-wide-web, the PDA and the iPhone, technological developments have expanded our community from “down the road” to “around the world.” (A special “thank you” to Steve Jobs for the iPhone by the way!) People are offered the opportunity to connect with practically anyone, anywhere, anytime. From grandparents to grade-schoolers, everybody can be “in touch” on any number of levels.

Advancements in technology have not only transformed communication, they have transformed the culture of community. Look at the rise of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Loopt and the estimated 175,000 blogs created every day (1). People have access to each other twenty-four hours a day by computer, cell phone, Blackberry or iPhone, constantly communicating anything and everything with their “virtual friends” all around the world.  Kip, from Napoleon Dynamite sang it right. We DO love technology.

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