Good weekend, Blue Like Jazz

I hope your weekend was as good as mine. Saturday we had a great camp board meeting. Church on Sunday was awesome followed by lunch at Rick and Sue’s, a quick hop into Caiden Walls’ third birthday party, then the pièce de résistance, bouldering at South Fork with Mexican food to follow. Monday Thatcher had a doctor’s appointment in Albuquerque so Felecia went with us and we made a day out of it. We had a fun time at the zoo, bought too much stuff at REI including the biggest Nalgene ever http://www.rei.com/product/629248, and had a great dinner at Taco Cabana. What really set Monday off was Felecia’s purchase of climbing shoes, a chalk bag, and an REI membership. Welcome to the club Leash!

Lately I have been reading through Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I am considering it for our summer devotionals, it is awesome. Here is a long quote as an appetizer and to make your brain work a little this week.

“In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and moreover, that I didn’t want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. ‘Then why don’t you want to defend Christianity?’ he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won’t do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn’t like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.”

Spring Break Availability

I hope all is going well for you. Things are good around here. We are looking forward to some board meetings this weekend. In the last board meeting Stan was announced as our new director. That was three months ago, he has been here almost two months, and I tell you, things have never run better. I am thrilled to have you work in this uplifting atmosphere.

I am excited that spring break is approaching and that I will get to see many of you during that time. If you will be available to work at all over your spring break please let me know. If you can work I will use you. I can probably use you forty hours a week! For those of you who have already expressed your availability, thank you. For the rest of you, please let me know your availability as soon as you can!

In church this Sunday Brenda Garber, some of you may know her, read this passage about how sometimes we express devotion with our mouths but not with our hearts. Let us not be those people. “My people come to you, as they usually do, and sit before you to listen to your words, but they do not put them into practice. With their mouths thy express devotion, but their hearts are greedy for unjust gain. Indeed, to them you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well, for they hear your words but do not them into practice. When all this comes true — and it surely will — then they will know that a prophet has been among them.” Ezekiel 33:31-33

We miss what we have again

I hope yours has been a blessed week. I know mine has. Have you ever noticed that you don’t really realize how much you miss something until you have it again? This happened to me twice this week. We had not had groups around here for three weeks, then this weekend we did. I didn’t realize how much I missed having groups. They are the reason we work here and I missed serving them. Secondly we had a huge snow storm Tuesday. I didn’t realize how much I missed snow. It was awesome. Of course, I had to travel to Albuquerque during the storm, which made things interesting, but I still realized how much I missed snow.

I hope you are getting excited for this summer. I am. It promises to be great. Something happens every May. Summer staff arrives and Bonita Park as a community realizes how much we missed you. You are the life of Bonita Park. You bring joy and new life to an exciting ministry.

I leave you with the closing words from one of my two favorite books, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, “For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.”

Solitary

Most of you know Brandon Hutchison our Outdoor Education Minister at Angus Church. Brandon and his wife Ashley have offered to host dinner and a devotional at their house every Thursday night this summer which is awesome. Brandon has also offered to do one of his outdoor programs with us, for free, during training week or soon thereafter. The program is called Solitary and sounds awesome. We would do some basic first-aid and survival training then head out to the woods to spend twenty-four hours totally alone with guided devotionals and bible readings so that we might focus totally on God and realign our priorities.

What do you think? Is this something you might be interested in doing? I realize that this would be way out of all of our comfort zones, in fact it sounds downright uncomfortable, but like Jesus spent 40 days alone in the desert before he started his ministry it could be pretty great for us to spend one day alone in the woods. I appreciate your feedback.