This past week has been filled with great anticipation as we prepare for our trip up to Chicago (not to mention St. Paul, MN, Indy, phew!)!  We don’t know all that God holds before us, but we’re excited about meeting new people, eating new foods, and bundling up just a bit tighter as we make our way up North!

We’ve been sending out family update postcards to all our family and friends, preparing for a public presentation of our future mission work in Chicago, catching up on bills/junk mail (fascinating reading!).

I’ve been really thankful for my beautiful wife as of late; last night we celebrated our 2 year anniversary!  She is a full partner in what we are doing both here and in Chicago; believing in me, in our vision, and most importantly in GOD to be faithful to us.
Over this next week, please pray for Trina and I as we try our best to communicate what God has been showing us to those that we meet.  I’ll post as many thoughts and pictures as I can throughout the week up in the Windy City!

I found this on YouTube - a p-unny parody of the Mac vs. PC commercials (of which we have all come to love and despise.)

I’m a Christ follower

I had another one of those pump-you-up kind of conversations just a few days ago. You know the kind that you have in the midst of a “none of this is going right” kind of situation?

Chris and I have been worshipping together as part of a church for most of the semester now. It’s been difficult to get to know Chris, because we both live such frenetic lifestyles, and are invested deeply as students. He and I have had several chances over these past few months however to sit down and discuss our lives and what it means to be a vibrant family of Jesus.

Our little faith family of about 10 has been meeting now for just about one full year. In that year we have gone from just me, my wife, and one of my closest friends, to a broader and much more diverse family. Among us as we worshipped have been students, adults, little kids, the poor, the rich, the lost, the saved, alcoholics, foreigners…the mix has been great and we have loved it. And we have hated it. It is the business of seeing community as the real people you’re living with, rather than the ideal world we all tend to live in.

Bonhoffer’s great quote, “He who loves community, destroys community” could not have been made more real than in my own heart this year. I wanted so badly for our church to move beyond the superficiality that we as Americans all struggle with. Many of us wanted this, but Fear and Anxiety kept us from digging deeper.

So as Chris and I sat in his truck, discussing where our little family in Christ will go as we move into the New Year, it hit us. “It all comes down to opening our eyes.” Unless we have open eyes, we’ll never be able to see the hurt inside our brother or sister and name that for what it is. Unless we look with eyes wide open, there’s no way we can think about church outside the box of what we’ve grown up knowing. Unless our hearts truly desire the change from community-as-program to community-as-life-in-Christ, we will continually neglect and ultimately destroy each other.

Jesus seemed to be okay with people not getting it – though he didn’t let them get away with it! He was constantly drawing people out of their own selfish circles and into a world where they could learn to love others more deeply. A world where God was the center, and everything else flowed from that.

Lord, I want to see. I want to see you at the center. I want to see you at the center of our simple, little church.

No one can make someone desire something they don’t internally desire. (Believe me, Trina just doesn’t seem to get as excited about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as I do, no matter how much I try to convince her how cool they are!) For those who are ready to commit to being a family together, I am ready to go deeper. For those not interested, I bless them and send them. Not everyone has what it takes to face the brutal world of life together.

This means some big things for my life. It means a major reorienting of my lifestyle. I had planned on another very full semester this spring. It may be that I could learn more outside the classroom from my brothers and sisters. I had planned on continuing on in this life of isolation without much getting in my way; looks like that’s going the way of the dodo bird. I had thought I would get to Chicago before discovering community…maybe I’m supposed to find it right here in the desert of West Texas.

I love community – but I love my church family more.

Well, I feel as if I’ve made it out of some long tunnel and have finally breathing some fresh air again after an arduous semester!

Some reflections on this semester (even before finals are technically over!):

- I’ve made some great strides in learning who I am. I spent most of my energy this semester (for better or for worse) learning and thinking about my religious heritage: Churches of Christ and the Stone-Campbell Movement that began in the 17th Century. Kind of a peculiar place to start, looking at my values. I have however lived deeply into this fellowship, developing a taste for its best principles, and doing my best to reject the parts of the movement’s fallen nature that can be seen in any human system. I drank deeply from the wells of Barton Stone, David Lipscomb, and T.B. Larimore. I also wrote a major research paper on my own grandfather, Cecil Willis. Learning his stories, his values, and his very humanness allowed me to see a lot of myself in my grandfather, and made me aware of my own potential short comings; what my propensities are based on what I have learned from my family. In short, this semester has opened my eyes to myself.
- I’ve given myself over to the temptation of “academia”. I don’t like to admit it, but I was sucked into the the library, when my heart was elsewhere. I felt that I needed perfection in my studies, partly because I valued the projects I was working on (see above), but partly because I’ve lost the tight-knit community that kept me accountable to the mission work I was so focused on last year in MRNA. I guess when I really sit down to think about it, I turned down the opportunity for a missional community of two or three, and instead took up the life of a hermit, seeing how far I could poke my nose inside a book. Of course, this also affected my blogging!

- I grew deeper in interdependence with others. I won’t lie. Our “abbey” holy experiment has been a difficult one. It’s not always natural, its not always holy at all. But when we confessed to each other our frustrations in the midst of a greater community a few weeks ago, we felt the very presence of our Lord, and gave ourselves over to one another. We are learning that life is lived better when we may have less personal space, but have more chances to work and live and love together. Trust is still something we are learning, but our next steps are becoming clearer.

- It’s become so clear to me that I NEED 2 or 3 brothers who will fight for my heart. This kind of relates to the previous reflections, but this is so central to it all that I need to restate it here.  No, I need to write a whole post on it. No, I need to create a whole new blog on it… wait, maybe I should just try living more deeply into it.  Why do we think that we can stay focused on God, live a life on mission with him, pay our taxes and whatever else, without a band of brothers that truly know each other?  It’s absurd!  It’s preposterous!  It’s the American Way!

Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, I know I have been changed over this past semester.  I anxiously anticipate looking for God’s fingerprints as we move forward in this grand story of redemption.

Now that I’m looking back on this past semester, I’m anxious to spend

This could be a problem…

In other news, I’ll be heading up to Searcy, Arkansas this weekend to meet up with a team of missionaries in training and heading for Chicago in the next year and a half.  After meeting up with them, I’ve met their mentor and I’m excited to see what is possible to do in working with these guys and gals in the future.  Please keep us all in prayer this weekend.

In still OTHER news…I’ve added a few links to the “Sites to hang your hat on” section.  God’s been pulling on my heartstrings in some radical ways lately, so if you give a “hoot” about social justice and the environment (and Christian “anarchy”) check these sweet pages out.

Finally, I’ve been watching my server begin the long road to its final destruction.  If you can’t access my page, it might be because my server (”ole Bess” as I call her) finally bit the dust.  I’m currently looking into solutions here.