My Life on Fridays
Friday’s have become a sort of planning and processing day for me. I’m enjoying my classes this semester very much, but I’m becoming increasingly aware that in a year and just a few months I will be finished with school here and be heading off to the distant land of Chicago to live as a missionary. This reality has a deep impact on me for sure, and so I’m putting myself to the task of praying specifically for that city every day, asking the Lord to launch workers into that very ripe harvest field. Fridays then are a day of preparation and dreaming with God – a time to seriously think about life in the city, working and living missionally among the people who call it home.
And we hope to call it home as well! Trina and I are already brushing up on the Windy City (which actually beats Abilene in terms of wind velocity!) and learning about the festivals, art, and people. Chicago is the blues capital of the world, its got great pizza, great baseball, and did you know that every July the oldest church in the city (Old St. Patrick’s) throws the world’s largest block party? Rock bands, two nights, two stages, “plus all the beer you can drink”. What kind of crazy town is this? 
The Jazz festivals, the art museums, the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival…it wont be hard to call it home.
In many ways, we’re experiencing the best community of our lives here in Abilene. We’re also getting to help with the early stages of a prototype of what church might look like in the 21st century. But this town has and always will be a training ground. Almost everyone we talk to reminds us of that. They have been so supportive of us, reminding us that even Jesus went out into the wilderness before he began his ministry. I came to this town for training, and soon God will call us out together in mission.
The love from the community of friends and family that we are experiencing here is something that we can’t keep to ourselves for much longer. We see family and Sabbath rest as central to the way the Gospel is lived out before isolated, strung out Americans looking for an alternative way of living. Chicago is a city that needs desperately to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and by God’s grace to have that Great News transform it into (not a big churchy town but) a place where God is King.
