Save the World!

God of Wonders!

What an amazing God we serve!

He has been busy with us! He has spent the last few months teaching us how to live together, settling us into the routines of our new life in Buffalo, and giving us endless opportunities for relationships. We have began many relationships, and settled into a few regular routines of blessing. Our Sunday mornings have been a regular visit to a nursing home a block away; it seems to be a real blessing to the residents and staff of the facility. Our Wednesdays consist of a cell group meeting; fellowship and a meal, worship and prayer, and the Bible and discussion. We have had a handful of visitors to our cell meeting, and it seems as though some of them are connecting.

Our friend, Tommy, has been a real source of joy to me personally. He is constantly encouraging us with how blessed He is by our relationship. He continues to come with us to the retirement home and draw portraits, he was even doing portraits of staff members this past Sunday; he is becoming quite a hit! Pray for him, he struggles with demons of which most of us will never have the faintest comprehension...

Frank is a student from Taiwan at Buffalo State University whom we have adopted for the year. He has come over for lunch, and we have met for breakfast. I have had several spiritual conversations with him. He is a Daoist as is his family. Pray that God would bless his studies, and spark his heart with passion for Him.

Tamy and Dre are beginning their training to volunteer at Literacy Volunteers which is an organization that helps ESL children and adults learn the English language. There is a large Spanish-speaking population in Buffalo (Puerto Rican) as well as a surprisingly significant population of refugees from a couple of African nations. (We are excited to begin frequenting a local Somali restaurant when our budget loosens up a bit!) Pray that God sends us the nations right here in our own City!

Mary is now officially a volunteer at a local AIDS clinic. She went to her first event, she helped setup, and tear down, for a banquet in support of the organization. It was quite an experience for her (Dre also went with her), with dancing drag queens, chocolate fountains, tango lessons, wine-tasting, and prizes including an autographed photo of Ru-Paul. Exactly the type of party that the Pharisees wouldn't approve of Jesus going to... We have begun following in the footsteps of our sending church. We gave a tithe of our monthly church budget as an 'outreach offering' to the AIDS clinic, along with a letter explaining to them that we love Jesus and want to serve them as they serve a group of people that He loves. After reading the letter and receiving the money, the volunteer coordinator asked Mary some questions about our church and then opened the door for us to serve their clients.













I have finally begun to see some headway in my desire to get involved at the BSU campus. I had the leader of the InterVarsity group on campus over for lunch. (IV is a Christian student organization that is nationwide) She explained to me that at this time their only real need is for someone to 'disciple the young men!' We are moving forward (much to slowly for me!), and needless to say, I am very excited at the prospect of being involved in the lives of the men God wants to use to change the face of the city of Buffalo and the world! Pray for open doors to reach out to the students who are unconnected to student ministries already in existence.

All this to say that, God is beginning to open doors, and open other doors wider. Our relationships, and service, are starting to show the signs of fruit. However, I saved the best story for last...

We have had several opportunities to serve at the local Mission. We are still in the process of setting up a regular schedule to help out in the kitchen, but we have led worship and spoken at the chapel service a few times already. The pastor who lives across the street from me (his name is Paul, he is from Nigeria), invited us to come with him to the mission this past Sunday evening. He was going to preach, but he was hoping we could lead worship. We had fun preparing, we decided Sam would lead some, I would lead some, we would both play guitar, and Mary would play drums. Paul's worship leader, Edward, plays piano very well, and so he showed up and simply played along with us.

The night began with Carl, a young man (18) who has been coming to our small group and our Sunday outreach for the past two weeks, sharing with me that he had read the beginning of a book I gave him, The Father Heart of God, and it made him cry. Pray for Carl, he is a year into his faith journey and needs all the prayers he can get.

We met up with a couple from another Church in the area, ran through our worship set, and began to pray. We opened with the song 'God of Wonders' and when the chorus began you could hear the voices of many of the men shouting their praise to God. It was awesome... but only the beginning of the night.

The men continued to praise God with loud voices. Paul got up and preached on the many choices we make in our lives and the only choice that matters, surrender to the Lord of Life. We then got up and led the men in a spirited rendition of 'I Surrender All,' at which point Paul asked any who would want to surrender to Jesus to come and pray with us. A man named Tyrone walked up to me...

Tyrone is a large, soft-spoken, southern man. He has been in the chapel service every time I have been there so far, very engaged in what is being said and sung. I assumed he was already given to Christ. He told me, "I've never done this before, I don't know how to pray."

I prayed for him, that God would bless him; my friend Carl also prayed for him. Tyrone took out his cell phone and called his girlfriend, said hello, and then handed the phone to me, introducing me as, "one of God's people." I asked her if she were a spiritual person, she responded, "I believe in God." I asked if she were connected to a Church, she was not; I asked if she would like to be, "Yes," she said. I told her I would give Tyrone my number and we would get together. I then asked Tyrone, "Would you like to pray, is there anything on your heart that God has been doing with you tonight, anything you would want to say to him?"

Tyrone asked me how to pray. "You talk to God just the same way you are talking to me..."

"Hello, this is Tyrone, I'm just here with some of your people..." he began his first conversation with his Creator! How meek, humble, amazing, and earth-shattering!

When Tyrone finished praying I told him, "You can call God Papa, you can call Him Father, you can call Him Daddy, you can call Him whatever you like; He is your Father and He loves you dearly, you are his Son and He loves you tremendously."

This big, soft-spoken man began to weep, "I love you Daddy, I love you Father!"

He grabbed onto me, continuing to proclaim his love for our Father in between sobs; I began to cry...

We prayed together. I asked Tyrone what he was doing for Thanksgiving. He ecstatically agreed to come for dinner.

Pray that Tyrone's new-found faith is a new beginning, not merely an 'event.' Pray that he and his girlfriend take our invitation for Thanksgiving dinner.

Pray for us that God would continue to use us to love the city of Buffalo.

Never cease to praise Him for his glorious wonder!


This is a picture from the night at the mission; Paul is the man in the center, Edward is the worship leader of Paul's church, he is the man on the right. The gray-haired man and the other woman are Curt and Linda from a church outside of Buffalo.

compassion and mercy, reflection of love?

This is something that I was thinking about the other day. I was talking with a friend of mine about a passage of scripture
"For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion."
Romans 9:15" and what we thought about that. My friend was saying how this passage made her angry because it seems like God is showing partiality to some and not to others but he tells us not to do this. The next day I was thinking about this and praying and I felt like I was being given a revalation about this subject...
These are the thoughts that I had about this topic while praying and it was so clear that I had to write it down for my friend and she told me that it spoke to her. So here were my thoughts about it:

God's mercy and compassion in not a reflection of his love. In most of us, we are usually able to show mercy and compassion to those that we love and so it is a reflection of our love for a person. However I believe that God loves everyone and that his mercy and compassion is not dished out to those that he loves more. Rather that mercy, compassion, and hard lives are the tool with which God uses to help us fulfill our destiny.
"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."
Romans 8:28.

I was thinking that at times those of us who have had really hard lives feel slighted, like God loves those who have had an easier life more but I don't think that this is the case. I think that it really is just each of us have different things that God uses in our lives to develop us into the people that he has called us to be. We all need to know the whole love of God if we are ever to really love the world and I don't think that God would tell us to love each other as he has loved us, if his love for us was slighted or if we were loved less than others.

So my thought is that to everyone that has ever felt like they wish that the could have been God's favorite don't fret you are, If your life has been hard be encouraged that it was not because you were loved less but rather that God knows and loves you more intimately that anyone and he alone knows what will or will not make you into the man or woman he has destined you to be. So we all must grab the bull by the horns and embrace all that is good, and all that is bad knowing that you been given these opportunites because you are so loved that you will not be left to stagnate but rather always in everything given the opportunity to grow...

(please remember these are just my thoughts and ponderings while praying)

Cells

*These are old thoughts, I just found them, and cleaned up to make them comprehensible*


I have come to the conclusion that health consists of a unique blend of structure and no structure; clarity and ambiguity. To use a natural metaphor a plant grows best when we combine the completely spontaneous with a structure that does not prohibit the natural growth of the plant but rather aids it. A ditch for water, a watering schedule to maintain proper ammounts, soil additives, weeding, posts for growing vines, etc. Just so, when we speak of Church health, there are quite natural and spontaneous effects of the Spirit of God within a human being. Once the Spirit has been 'planted' we do not make it grow, and we can kill it by over-structure (thinking that we can make the growth happen by our administration), but we can also help its growth by optimal levels of structure properly implemented.

The pro's and con's:

First we must state that amorphism itself is a structure. In order to have 'no structure' one must have a void. A random structure is still a structure. A neglected garden in one sense does not lack structure, rather it lacks intentionality. There are still the structures provided by the natural processes themselves (fiber structures, chemical processes, various ecological niches, etc.), there is simply not the rows, schedules, etc. that allow for the plants protection, care, and harvest.

Secondly we must state that it is easier to change a plan than to create one. The one more likely to be able to creatively adapt to new situations is the one who has deeply thought out the current situation and mapped out a plan to deal with it. The individual who has neglected a proscribed course of action, will not even have a framework with which to engage the future, much less to creatively change to meet it.

Structure is beneficial in that it helps to provide direction. Just as a vine needs something to climb, so do our spiritual lives need direction. Boundaries are immensely helpful to prevent injury, or even just redundancy. Freedom is beneficial in that it allows for growth.

Too much structure will actually impede growth.
Not enough structure will fail to protect and guide growth, and ultimately hinder the harvest.

Too much structure will prohibit spontenaity...
...not enough structure will prevent purposeful direction
An adequate ammount of structure will provide needed direction and prevent useless redundancy...
...an adequate ammount of freedom will allow for creative response to new contexts, and will prevent the reduction of what is inherently organic to a formula.

For this reason, I believe Churches should structure around relationships. We have seen that structure is ubiquitous and unavoidable, even (in spite of my own proclivity to 'kill structure') necessary. Yet in structuring our Church around a program we lose the thing that is important; this would be akin to structuring your apple orchard as an assembly line. The opposite error would be to refuse to intentionally structure the Church; this would be akin to letting the apples take root wherever they fell. Neither makes sense. The central aspect of the apple orchard is the living, growing, healthy apple tree. The orchard needs to be structured in such a way as to maintain the health of the tree and produce healthy fruit. However, the purpose of the apple orchard is providing fruit to the customer at a reasonable price. The orchard needs to be structured in a way so as to make the fruit accessable for harvesting it (hence the rows). So too, in a Church we must structure the Church around the most important thing, relationships; the individual with Jesus, and the individuals with each other. This could look like a myriad of different structural possibilities, however, there would be some commonalities:

The structure would serve and encourage the individual relationship with Jesus.
The structure would serve and encourage the individual relationship with other disciples.
The structure would serve and encourage the inclusion of individuals outside the community.
The structure would serve and encourage propagation, at the individual, relational, and community levels.

We must be confident that whatever structures we implement, whether by intentional planning or unintentional neglect, should accomplish these purposes.

For Grandma

Community

Community is soap in your omlette!

To all who fantasize about the wonderful joys of communal living, let me burst your bubble...

Community is decaf coffee when you really want caffeinated, cold food, warm toilet seats, dealing with night owls in the morning (and at night), having marital disputes in front of an audience, dissappointed expectations, frustrated desires, confused statements, and endless inconveniences. Community is what keeps me from finishing this post in less than three sittings...

So why do it?

Why subject yourself to the whims of others?

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

"For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it."

There is a road that is easy, that appeals to our desires, and that leads to death. There is another road that, even to travel down is to experience a kind of death, and yet, this is the road that leads to infinite blessing, and eternal life. The way of community is the way of self sacrifice, and the way of life. The way of community is the way of Jesus.

The same person who drinks the last cup of coffee, is the one who loves my children as if they were their very own; the person who is moody with me in the morning is the one who encourages me in the evening; the community who watches my pettiness with my wife, is the same community who also reveals their own personal struggles with me; the person who 'selfishly' eats the last of the food is the one who goes out of their way to bless me with some small treat they know I like.

The simple truth is, community is the way of loving others before ourselves, loving others before ourselves means death to our self, and the one only prerequisite of a full, abundant, eternal life, is the execution of our self.

So...

...while the community experience continues to provide me with those wonderful experiences I have heard described as 'having the edges knocked off in God's spiritual rock tumbler' I am also experiencing the joy of Christ surrounded by people who love me in spite of my blemishes, and whom I dearly love.