But it has me thinking some about where my dollars go.  In a booming economy, it seemed no one minded giving their hard-earned dollars to big companies that moved all the money to one side of the boat – tipping us toward a capsize.  Well, I don’t want to go into the water.

Instead, a few years ago we as a society remembered what it was like to buy things from each other.  Rather than a computerized woman checking out our oatmeal creme pies and CoCo Puffs, now we’re buying locally – handing cash (or in some cases, local currency!) across a fold-up card table in exchange for a heirloom tomato picked this morning in a farm just outside of town.

You know that feeling you get after a cross-country flight?  That’s how your tomato feels too.  …Buying local is great for taste, and your pocket book.

But there’s something I’m adding to the long litany in your purchasing portfolio:

BUY SOCIAL!

I’m finding my friends and family are taking advantage of our current economy along with the rise of Facebook and other sites like it to step into a new venture.  My sister-in-law sells wickless candles, my friend sells gourmet meals, two of my cousins just released their first album (rock and folk), and my mom sells health products.  I’m certain that I can get into the paper goods business, selling all my friends and family toilet paper and such.

Just think – the more connected we all become, the more we become self-marketers, (every status update is a promotion of you.)  If you wanted to make money what better place to advertise than to your friends and family on a place where they spend an average of 45mins a day waiting for you to say something?

Now, no one wants a nag – and we’ll all have to learn to continue to treat our friends and family as real, honest people – something corporations with million-dollar commercials forgot a long time ago.  Maybe with a real, honest social connection, we’ll know how to best keep our “warm market” from becoming “warmed over.”  I love my family and friends more than I want their business.  Much much more!

And it works.  I’m finding that my family and friends involved in this new economy: 1) deeply respect the boundaries of marketing to me and 2) we are engaging each other in new ways as we talk about the products and services they truly believe in!

I love handing money to a local farmer – but I really love handing money to a friend or family member for goods and services.  It is as if I am once again looking at changing my buying habits – why buy from Sam Walton’s family when I can buy from my own?

More often than not, it is messy dance of back and forth.  It is ambiguous victories mixed with incomplete failures.  I don’t know half the time whose side I’m fighting for – and often it feels like my efforts are doing more harm for the Kingdom than good.

Why all this self-doubt?  We’re getting toward the end of Lent, and I realize each year that no matter how much purging and confession and buffeting I do to hone myself closer to the Living God, there is simply no way to transcend the fact that I’m a person who will also be mixed with the spiritual warfare going on all around us. At times I pick up the flag of the enemy and run in the opposite direction, hell bent on destroying everything I desperately want to see accomplished in God’s work here in Chicago.

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement once said:

“What we do is very little.  But it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes.  Christ took that little and increased it.  He will do the rest.  What we do is so little that we may seem to be constantly failing.  But so did he fail.  He met with apparent failure on the Cross.  But unless the seeds fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest.”

Being a missionary isn’t a neat and tidy job, but then again, Jesus had a fine time living in ambiguity and failure.  That brings me peace.

Truth is, we’ve been working on our Layers Course: MESO for the last week or so, as well as getting ready for some big projects in the near future.  MICRO is coming in November – and I can’t wait to see what God does with that!

I’ve been working some with Ignite Church Planting – the local organization that we’re connected to here in the city.  They are a 100 year old church planting organization that has helped promote church planting all over Chicagoland for the last 100 years.  It’s an honor to be working on projects with them, even as we continue to develop our organic network here in the city.

Seeing a new church planting in West Loop area, and new faces coming around the network like crazy right now!

Just a few things to get you caught up on the Days of our Lives!