My Kick-Butt Ninja Weekend…of Prayer
Great times over the weekend.
Friday night was the big night – TMNT came out in theaters!!! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were an epicenter in my growing up years, and for the last several years they have been a means of deep, meaningful, personal reflection…and kick-butt ninja action!
The flick was CGI, so you felt like the 5th turtle as you watched mutant turtles with bulging muscles swinging and flipping across NYC’s skyline. The story was all about how after the Turtles defeated the Shredder, they couldn’t find a real reason to stay a family – so they begin to drift apart. What unites them is learning to appreciate each other’s unique strengths, rather than using each other to defeat evil. An interdependent team of 4 rather than a 4 person (turtle) team. Sounds a lot like Ephesians 4! (What’s with the four’s in this post?)
So in honor of the ninja turtles, me, my bro, and some others dressed up in ninja turtle garb and ran into the movie theater, with ninja kicks and “hi-ya!”s. When all the kids saw us, they literally flipped out, especially the younger ones. Some actually thought we were REAL ninja turtles, and one asked me if I liked pizza. We had a pre-show ninja fight, which got us really pumped up for the flick – and got the kids screaming with delight. I’m sure the parents loved us…
Saturday was our second ACU “Discover Abilene” day. Its basically a day of missional prayer, where students and anyone else interested head out all over town to “see what God is already doing” in our city. We sent them out in 28 groups of 2, and gave each a certain zone to pray over. Agent B apparently saw one of these groups take a picture of Obi Wan’s house, which is just goes to show that God truly is placing “workers (or secret agents) in his harvest field” (Luke 10:2).
As we discussed on Saturday, its not that there isn’t enough work to be done, its just that there aren’t enough harvesters!
Trina and I went down to an area with a lot of retail and coffee shops, as well as a lot of post WWII houses and a new uppity neighborhood with huge lawns and sparkling cars. Among houses, we saw old-run-downs next to old-but-maintained, with huge mansions-with-corvettes just a couple of blocks away. It made me wonder what all these people could really have in common.
At one of the coffee shops we visited, there is a fountain that is usually turned off. What good is a well that has no water? Trina and I discovered that part of our job as missionaries is to find those wells that don’t have any water, and to help those at these dry wells learn how to retrieve it.
Christ is the living water – and people dig down to find a distorted version of that life at coffee shops or mini malls, or sometimes at church buildings or lots of other places people gather. But entertainment and coffee is not the deepest, most satisfying aquifer we can find. Missionaries call on people to dig deeper at their wells; to discover the living water that awaits them – that lives within them!
miller are discussing. 
Agent B 6:38 am on March 27, 2007 Permalink
For the record…it was Agent Wife who saw folks photographing Obi-Wan’s house. I was working in Jones Co. But the 2 become 1, I guess.
And yea, old cruddy houses mixed in with mansions…
Before I live where I do now, we lived in and around Highland coc for 5 years and walked all over that neighborhood. Once there was literally a run-down shack inhabited by homeless folks located ONE block away from Sayles Private Drive (700 block of Sayles) where the houses are worth over half a million $. Weird.
The shack has since been bulldozed…
…and I heard about your TMNT gig. Funny.
Mark 6:47 am on March 27, 2007 Permalink
So I am inclined to say that this whole gentrification thing is BAD NEWS for the poor – that the rich setting up shop just blocks away from lower-income housing would only bring more injustice to the underprivileged… but I could be missing something.
Could there be something God is trying to do in the midst all this rich-people-tearing-down-impoverished-homes-to-build-mansions (gentrification)? I’m just postulating; could the rich be moving in mere feet away from our nation’s poorest “for such a time as this”?
I’m just trying to imagine how God is going to use this situation for his glory. Any ideas?