life has been too real lately. work has been too much of...well too much work. sleep has been few and far between and stress: overly abundant.
I think back to my youth ministry days when I would feel overwhelmed or (laughing) overworked and...wow. how life changes when your paycheck depends directly on your activity, your hustle, YOUR results. going from work to sleep to work and then have the weekend to look forward to more work. heck of a way to go through life. slushies and starbucks and crazy middle school kids sounds pretty good.
actually, things are starting to work out. you make enough cold calls. you meet with enough people. you throw enough stuff into the funnel, things do start to come out the other end. In a lot of ways, I feel like people's prayers for me are being answered. Not just that, but the kindness and caring that people have shown has been blessed and multiplied. I am truly grateful.
I am pumped because we have new friends. maybe our first friends down here in the land of cane. Matt and Lisa. Matt is the new pastor intern at Crosspoint and it turns out he knows a lot of the same people I do. I hope he doesn't ask them about me though. Might want to wait till they have more skin in the game before they really get to know us y'know.
We have played Settlers of Cattan together and introduced him to Shiner Bock and Guy Clark. They are an answer to prayers.
He is in charge of the communion service called Stauros and he wants to do a lot of great things with it. Give it a pomo feel. I am totally pumped. Alicia and I are going to help with it and I am going to be a part of the planning. I feel like even though my body and even my mind is extremely tired, God is waking up my spirit, bringing hope and faith.
I have talked with him and pastor bill about blogging and they are thinking about it. looking forward to linking to them if they take the plunge.
In other news, I have been trying to drop those LB's. Doing the whole "shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch and then a healthy dinner" Needless to say, I am not an extremely happy camper around 5:30. I start to salivate when I see small woodland creatures and plump co-workers. I think it's working. But then, we don't have a scale anymore (that's one of the downsides to moving 5 times in 4 years - you lose crap) so I really don't have any clue. For all I know, I could be getting fatter.
Sorry for all the inconsistency. Flood or Famine. That's how I roll.
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ramblings, musings, and sometimes a point
8 comments:
Glad to see you're still around.
i'll trade you all the sleep i've been getting being unemployed and officially out of school for some of that activity ... i'm tired of sleeping away the day ...
welcome back to bloggerville; I, too, have been itinerant, but hope to settle back in some time soon... still busy trying to find crap from move number four in five years. maybe that's why we like Settlers so much--'cause they're flippin' SETTLED.
one question: what is a "pomo" feel? on my computer screen it actually looked like "porno" at first. I hope that's wrong.
HA!! yeah, we're a REALLY progessive church... POMO is short for post-modern and that is emergent, old and yet newer than contemporary. some refer to it as smells and bells but it brings back the sacred and ancient into modern worship settings. verses the sit back and be entertained (or innertained...a cute buzzword i heard recently)
big among 20's and teens who have been over-tained and are looking for the spiritual and mystical. of course they are turning more towards hinduism and buddhism and even Islam because they appear to be more spiritual than the sanitized, prepackaged, never offensive contemporary Christianity. while the prevailing thought in the 90's was that to be seeker sensitive you had to remove all things religious and become very un-church looking and feeling. a kind of Tony Robbins with a cool band that offered life change (what people were seeking) through God. Now people are in fact seeking a god, a spirit to connect with, something bigger than themselves and the god we offer seems to small and man made. Worship services, then, become more about actual worship of God and giving people the opportunity to connect with God. no naked people involved.
Good to hear. I would be interested to see how that kind of service compares, externally, to an Orthodox liturgy. What you described in your comment is precisely what has drawn so many Protestant Christians in the United States to Orthodoxy over the past 30-40 years.
forgive my tardiness in responding... definitely the ancient-future-post-modern-emergent movement is evident in people turning towards orthodoxy. the ritual, drawing from the ancient well, the spiritualism are all things younger generations are seeking and coming up dry when they turn to most modern churches. no matter how entertaining. the Kabal effect, people looking at jewish mysticism and hinduism etc. The other aspect of orthodoxy that is especially attractive is the very strong community that is developed, no that is not the right word. insisted. being a part of an orthodox church is, fringe involvement is not an option. that whole relational commitment is attractive, while at the same time a true post-modern would balk at having to agree with everything. quicker to trust the experience than doctrine.
It has been interesting, and saddening, for me to discover that Orthodoxy, like any other faith, has members who were born and raised within the Church but have grown into that essentially "fringe involvement", thinking of their faith as an experience more cultural than spiritual . It is more often the converts who show that passionate commitment, because their lives have been changed by the knowledge that their "personal experience" is not the barometer of truth. To discover a church that has been guided by the Holy Spirit since the time of Christ inspires that "insistence" on complete acceptance. In other words, I don't accept what the Church teaches because I, in my infinite wisdom, happen to think they're right. I accept it because I am confronted with the poverty of my limited experience by the riches of Orthodox Tradition.
along the same lines that this discussion was following, here is a very insightful and well-expressed article about the differences (and similarities) between Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism. well worth reading if you have a moment.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/008/28.42.html
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