Enter New Phase.

Yesterday was my first day as an RA back at Moody (RA stands for Resident Assistant). Been busy the past two weeks with RA training and preparation for new and returning students, leadership meetings, conflict resolution programs, etc. It will be fun and challenging to be the RA of a new floor. I’m looking forward to this new phase of my life.

This summer has been great. I would be overstating if I said it was phenomenal, but it was far better than any other summer I’ve had. I think. Here’s my review (I’ll indent it to make it look more official):

Antioch church has some really amazing qualities to it. The staff and leadership have expressed great interest in exploring, examining, exposing, and encouraging the divine design inherent in each of us as bearers of the image of God. That is a great goal to strive toward, since it makes God supremely valuable in valuing and trusting the purpose of his created design. I’ve always thought this to be idealistic, but it’s been so good to see it actually in practice. It will be great to see how this continues to play itself out as the church grows.

The internship is both fun and hard work, and the church is young, so there is lots to do. If you aren’t doing anything, just ask, and you’ll have plenty to work on. Meetings are short and sweet: this is awesome. For everyone. I don’t know if anyone really likes meetings, and so when we are able to maximize our time by sticking to the allotted time frame and meeting schedule. Things moved quickly. Meeting times and events were communicated clearly and continued to be communicated clearly throughout the course of the internship.

Mentorship was great. I had Matt Smith as my mentor. He has been heavily involved with an organization called World Relief NEXT and in addition to pastoring at Paradox, was also leading the Solitude internship for those interns as well. Matt’s been a great guy to bounce ideas off of and it’s been rich to hear his heart and take in his teaching. We went through the book In The Name of Jesus by Henri Nouwen – the same author he used when mentoring the Solitude interns (a book ironically called Reaching Out). I’ve greatly enjoyed our time together and enjoyed learning from him, beginning to understand the value of slowing down and being still and being alone with the God of the universe. I catch myself sometimes in groups of students or other RA’s actually just wanting to leave and get away and be alone. It’s relaxing. It’s refreshing.

The other interns were all fantastic. At first, there was a complaint that a lot of the Moody students tended to hang out with each other for the most part. This tendency is normal. But I think it broke down soon after that, and we all meshed pretty well with everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them all, working with them, hearing what they’ve been doing this summer, and spending time hiking or climbing or swimming with them all. As much as this summer’s been a great solitude experience, it’s been a great relational one as well.

The teaching and worship on Sunday mornings are great as well. Ken is a thorough thinker and carries his audience’s attention well. He allows them to follow his train of thought, and rarely loses them. He isn’t expositional and doesn’t necessarily speak straight from Scripture, but he does give a great deal of Scripture-informed thought. It is interesting and engaging to think through and beyond what Scripture says to what it means for us in our lives and in the lives of other believers throughout Christianity. I value many of the things he’s said over this summer, and have appreciated the opportunity to listen to his heart.

A potential hazard I foresee (and perhaps the only hazard, and maybe hazard is too strong a word) that would be wisely avoided would a path toward a somewhat-elitist value system. This summer I was stoked and excited for this internship largely because I was looking forward to a staff that would not only pour into me, but get to know me well enough to know what my natural strengths and weaknesses are, and how to make the most of those. Now I am good at a good number of things, but what am I great at? Am I great at anything? Some of the interns were specifically sought out and asked and encouraged again and again to come back to Antioch. They were extremely talented individuals. Others wanted to come back and offered, and were gladly accepted, but only a few were sought out. It’s been my journey over the last several weeks to cultivate in my own heart a readiness to celebrate the blessings that fall into the hands of others as if they had fallen into my own. It is good to do this. I don’t want jealousy to arise in me. I want to celebrate with them that something truly good has happened to them and they have found a place where their gifts and abilities are recognized, valued, encouraged, and challenged. And it is an unbelievably unrealistic expectation to think that everyone belongs there. But it would serve them well, and serve the body well, to see a staff or individual who intentionally seeks to draw out of people talents that don’t shine as brilliantly, and to value them just as much. There are fantastic individuals who have beautiful talents and abilities who have no idea they have them, or have had no one who has recognized those in them. And so naturally, they don’t make the best of those talents.

Maybe it’s just my heart to seek out the margins in every group of people, but I hope in the future to see not a wider or broader investment in interns, but a deeper investment. Not more interns, but maybe fewer. I love Antioch, and I love everyone there. They are awesome and perhaps one of the closest body of believers to what I hope will be the church I work with or attend for much of my life. And so, as with anything and everything, change is progress, and I hope that both change and progress continue to be a part of the growth process of Antioch church and its internship program. Corporations and organizations and churches – as with any system – are brutally attacked and criticized by so many, and I pray my voice would not be counted among them. Instead, I hope it would be an encouraging, sanctifying, empowering and trustworthy assessment that can be used for the growth and beauty of the body of Christ.

More to come on thinking over the summer, thank-you’s, and other great ways all of you can continue to journey with me throughout this semester and this year if you so desire.

Mt.13 / Graphics Design / Surf Trip.

Okay, so I’ve been writing and reading and working hard with message preparation for last night at Paradox.  After talking with Matt Smith, the missions pastor of Paradox and my mentor this summer, he told me that each lesson I teach at Paradox will follow the flow and story of what they’ve been working through so far.

Matt Smith

My guidelines were to follow a parable of Jesus, and how it connects with the kingdom.  I picked Mt. 13:33-34.  I’ll post my manuscript below.  Maybe I’ll scan my actual notes (after I print them, I write all over them to help me remember points that will move me along in thought as I speak).  There’s lines and arrows and underlining and circling and notes jotted in the margins.  There’s two parts right at the end that are large quotes from Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis – a book I revisited this week after reading it 4 years ago, and I was surprised to borrow a lot of material from it – I was thinking about the text I would be teaching, and was thinking of teaching it in terms of the enormous expanse that the kingdom is, and when I started reading it, realized my thinking had been shaped in ways I hadn’t realized by the material he had written years ago, along with the teaching of Cornelius Plantinga Jr. in his book Engaging God’s World.  I’ll take the time to type out the quotes for you, because I’ve been so busy this week and haven’t posted in a while, so I hope this will make up for the lack of posts this week.  Anyway, here’s what God’s been teaching me:

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THINKING AND JOY. I’m a thinker.  I think a lot.  I love to think about things, I enjoy it.  I enjoy the little things I thought about before that end up showing up later.

And I think that sometimes joy can come not from just doing the “right” thing, but with understanding it, with thinking about it in a really beautiful way.

Tonight I hope to push and press how you think about this world, about your identity, about the kingdom of God – I want to journey through understanding the kingdom of God to be bigger than maybe you’ve ever thought it could be, and I hope that it can come crashing into your reality, into your life, into your unique story with joy and delight and real, deep, saturating satisfaction.

THEN & NOW. I grew up mostly in the church, and was taught the Bible and what it says – that basically God made everything perfect way back in the beginning and put two people in a place called Eden, they sinned and screwed everything up for us.  Then a bunch of years later – after a big flood, a bunch of wars, some pretty bad kings, and getting kicked out of their country – Israel’s back in Jerusalem and hasn’t heard anything from God in 400 years.  Then comes a Jew named Jesus, who says he’s God and attracts a pretty significant following.  Which didn’t go over well with the local religious leaders.  So before he turns 33, one of his followers stabs him in the back for a little cash from these leaders, and Jesus is crucified. There, he dies for our sins on a cross, then rises again and leaves his life and teachings to his disciples to spread everywhere.  Fast forward 2000 years, and here we are, waiting for his kingdom to come.

It’s a great story, and a real one.

But for me, if that’s all there is to it, and if there’s nothing more to be said or thought about than that, then its dissatisfying to me.  Jesus came, and Jesus is coming back with all the glory of his kingdom.  But I want to know, What about today?  What about this – this life, right here, right now?

QUESTIONS & OUR BROKEN WORLD. I think we all ask those questions.  I know there’s times in my life when I look around – and I see the dysfunction of my family or feel the deep, deep pain in my friend’s life.  There’s times when stories travel from halfway across the world to shatter my own world like glass – and I hear about young girls who are raped and abused by their brothers and fathers on a daily basis, I hear about a country so ravaged by civil war that there are more land mines than people’s feet, I sit and listen to a friend on a street curb cry over her second miscarriage, I realize this world is far from what it was ever meant to be.  I find myself looking for some comfort or distraction, something – anything – that might keep my mind off of that ugly, ugly truth.

This world is broken.  We are broken.  We can look like we have it all together, and life can produce the illusion that all things are exactly as they should be.

But there’s more here than being broken.

LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW. There’s this dichotomy, this split, this division between the IS and the OUGHT.  Our lives are all in this hallway where, at times, we have a feeling or a sense, or we can see, or we experience in some event a glimpse of what the OUGHT looks like.

They are windows.

These windows are events or conversations or even just a moment, where we look out of the IS and see the OUGHT, where we stand in this dark hallway, walk over to the window, wipe the dust away and press our noses to the glass and peer out into the OUGHT – into the world God had always designed for us, the world that he desires for us now – and we see it and we want it.  We want it so badly.

This hallway.  This IS – it can look great.

Until we find ourselves staring out these windows into this fantastic world, this world of wholeness and completeness we could have never dreamed but always knew we were meant for, of all things being exactly what they were always meant to be.  Our eyes have adjusted to a dim world.  But if we’ll step to the window-pane and look out long enough for our eyes to re-adjust, to really see again, we realize…

We are really only left with one reaction.

THE PARABLE. If you have your Bibles, turn with me to MATTHEW 13:33.

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

For those of you who don’t know, yeast is the thing that makes bread rise. It’s this fine powder you put in the dough mix that keeps bread from being a flat, bubble-less cracker.  And in the Bible, it’s almost unanimously used as a symbol for something negative, something evil, something that corrupts.  It’s used in the Bible to incite the same feeling we get when we think of a computer virus.  And here, it’s using the same imagery, but meant to deliver a different meaning.  This parable, this simile, is told by Jesus so that we can begin to understand the nature of the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is about restoration.  And it’s unstoppable.

The idea of yeast in the dough is really important.  It’s the whole point.  The kingdom of God permeates everything, it is involved with everything, it works through and through and through until it has had its full effect on the whole thing.

Let’s go back to the text – look at verse 34.

Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. So was fulfilled  what was spoken through the prophet: “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.”

Here, Matthew’s calling us back to the beginning. When I think of the kingdom of God, I usually start with Jesus, with his ministry here on earth and him living out the gospel, teaching his disciples, doing miracles.  But Matthew – who we know is specifically writing to a Jewish audience – is calling their minds back to Genesis, back to the story of beginning, before all the bad kings and the wars, before the flood and the fall, back to Eden.  The kingdom was set in motion from the start.

EDEN AND PROGRESS.  Back in Genesis, we find God creating the world – but not just creating the world and looking at it, but creating it so that it embodies and mirrors and reflects who He is.  So God creates land, and then when he wants to make vegetation, he doesn’t create it himself, he says, “let the land produce vegetation” – he’s empowering creation!  We see it with the animals God has made – he tells the birds and fish to fill the skies and seas.  He doesn’t fill the skies and seas.  He has them fill the skies and seas.  He has filled creation with potential and the capacity for progress.  He teaches creation to create, just as He creates.

Then God creates people and tells them to care for it – this creation that’s made to reflect him and his creativity, to progress and increasingly bring him glory by being and operating in the way they were created to be.  Man now has this responsibility for the creation that God has named “good”.  So the first people were intimately connected to their environment, their purposes were inextricably unmistakably intertwined in a beautifully orchestrated masterpiece.

REALLY BIG REDEMPTION. This connectedness – this intertwining intimacy and interaction – is why redemption is so big.  Sometimes we think redemption is just about us.  Sometimes we think the cross is about our forgiveness, about getting back on good terms with God, about Jesus paying for our sins so we can be with him in heaven – and don’t get me wrong, it is!  It is about that, it’s about all those things.  But it is about so much more!  Take a look at Colossians 1:15-20:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead so that in everything, he might have the supremacy.  For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Jesus is about reconciling to himself all things.  All things!  There’s a figure of speech in the Bible called merism, where you name one extreme and then name the opposite extreme, and together they really mean everything in between.  It’s like when someone loses something and they say, ‘I searched that room floor to ceiling’ – they mean they looked everywhere.  Or if someone says ‘I’ve been working on this project from dawn to dusk’ – they mean they’ve been working on it not just in the morning or in the evening, but at all times in between.

Here Jesus isn’t interested in missing anything.  Jesus wants to reconcile to himself all things.  In Eden, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were in relationship with their environment, they were part of a masterpiece, and when they sinned and stepped out of harmony with God, out of shalom, everything fell apart.  Everything swung into chaos.  Jesus is about restoring everything, making everything right.  In Eden, everything Adam did wrong, Jesus lived out the right way, so that he could reverse and rewind the curse.  Jesus wants to restore all things back into harmony with him, back into shalom.

This is the kingdom and it is now.

A little yeast works through the whole dough.

WHAT NOW? The kingdom of God is about being involved in the movement of Jesus.  He’s taking old things and Jesus says, “See – I am making SOME things new?”  “I am making JUST MANKIND new?”  Jesus says, “See – I am making ALL THINGS new.”

Jesus is bringing heaven to earth.

Jesus is bringing the kingdom here.

Now.

Today.

Do you want to be a part of it?

In his book, Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell says this:

Jesus wants his followers to bring heaven, not hell, to earth.  This has been God’s intention for people since the beginning.  Jesus is not teaching anything new for his day.  God walked in the garden, looking for Adam and Eve.  God told the Israelites to build a tabernacle so he could live in their midst.  King Solomon built a temple, God’s house, so God could live permanently among his people.  And when Jesus comes, he’s referred to as God “taking on flesh and dwelling among us.”  Another translation of this verse is, “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”

The entire movement of the Bible is of a God who wants to be here, with his people.  The church is described later as being the temple of God.  And how does the Bible end?  With God “coming down” and taking up residence here on earth.

True spirituality then is not about escaping this world to some other place where we will be forever.  A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there.  A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.

The goal isn’t escaping this world but making this world the kind of place God can come to.  And God is remaking us into the kind of people who can do this kind of work.  (Velvet Elvis | 149-150).

T’SHUVA.

The kingdom is here.  The kingdom is now, it is present every day, will we open our eyes to it?  Will we participate in the movement of Jesus?  Are we in the business of restoring and renewing and reconciling all things?  What would that look like?  What does it look like to bring heaven here?  What does it look like for the kingdom to work its way through the whole batch of dough?

I want to leave you with this:

The remaking of this world is why Jesus’ first messages began with “T’shuva, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

The Hebrew word t’shuva means “to return.”  Return to the people we were originally created to be.  The people God is remaking us into.

God makes us in his image.  We reflect the beauty and creativity and wonder of the God who made us.  And Jesus calls us to return to our true selves.  The pure, whole people God originally intended us to be, before we veered off course.

Somewhere in you is the you whom you were made to be.

We need you to be you.

We don’t need a second anybody.  We need the first you.

The problem is that the image of God is deeply scarred in each of us, and we lose trust in God’s version of our story.  It seems too good to be true.  And so we go searching for identity.  We achieve and we push and we perform and we shop and we work out and we accomplish great things, longing to repair the image.  Longing to find an identity that feels right.

Longing to be comfortable in our own skin.

But the thing we are searching for is not somewhere else.  It is right here.  And we can only find it when we give up the search, when we surrender, when we trust.  Trust that God is already putting us back together.

Trust that through dying to the old, the new can give birth.

Trust that Jesus can repair the scarred and broken image.

It is trusting that I am loved.  That I always have been.  That I always will be.  I don’t have to do anything.  I don’t have to prove anything or achieve anything or accomplish one more thing.  That exactly as I am, I am totally accepted, forgiven, and there is nothing I could ever do to lose this acceptance.

God knew exactly what he was doing when he made you.  There are no accidents.  We need you to embrace your true identity, who you are in Christ, letting this new awareness transform your life.

That is what Jesus had in mind.

That is what brings heaven to earth.  (Velvet Elvis | 150-151).

Be who you were made to be.  Ask someone who knows you well – a really good friend or a family member and ask them the one or two things you are great at.  Who is it that you were made to be?  What is it you were uniquely crafted to do?  When we discover this, we are in process of restoring the image of God in us, restoring our first nature, our deepest purpose.  We open the windows of this hallway out into the OUGHT and pull it into the IS.  We take hold of it and allow it to renew us and restore us and reconcile us, and then we become the renewal and restoration and reconciliation of all other things.  Be who you were made to be.  Bring heaven to earth. Bring the kingdom here.

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In addition to message preparation and delivery, I’ve been working on graphics and media to be used for Paradox on Friday nights.  I’m designing three different cards that will be available to people coming to Paradox: a connection card, a card telling people what we’re about and who we are, and a card that has our calendar and events on it.  Here’s the first card, FRONT then BACK:

Contact Card (FRONT)

Contact Card (BACK)

In total, this card took 8 hours.

Last week, some of the interns went on a surf trip to the Oregon coast with the Antioch leaders.  It started off as a really rainy, cold day.  We walked all of our gear and stuff over to the shoreline and we were soaked with rain and mist and the wind was blowing, clouds were rolling over our heads, blocking the sun.  It looked bleak.  I was still really stoked about surfing, but I knew it wouldn’t be as fun without great weather.  And then, out of nowhere, the sun started to shine through, the temperature rose, and it turned into a beautiful day of relaxation and soaking in the beauty of creation.  We enjoyed one another’s company, and had a great day.  Here’s some photos:

First time I saw the Pacific Ocean.

The beach was a cove, where waves would come in to a roundabout, and was perfect for beginner surfers to practice catching some waves.

One of our intern friends spending some quiet quality time with God, just before he shared some of his heart and participated in communion together there on the beach.

I'd love to live by the ocean. Surfing is so much fun, and the coast is beautiful.

Antioch leaders and interns had a small fire and made food for lunch and dinner on the beach. Everyone had a great time, and as the sun began to sink, we grabbed our coats.

We stopped before leaving the beach to take some pictures of the beautiful view. It was breathtaking.

Rocks like these jut out of the water where we were surfing. There was a giant rock that was in the film "The Goonies" and we got to see that, too.

Here's some of the other interns enjoying the view - (from left to right) - Matt Albecete, Cole Timm, Liz Hild, Marianne Bach, and Becca Batten.

The sun set, and it was glorious.

ONE WEEK.

One week from today, I leave for Oregon.  As the internship gets closer, I’m starting to feel both anxious and excited.  The internship is going to be amazing; hard work isn’t so difficult with great people.  And this is what I love.  I love to see believers coming together to enjoy being with one another, to enjoy the union that it is to be part of/with the body of Christ: to really and truly be excited about that.  When we gather together and really love each other in the ways that we are created to give and receive love, edifying and encouraging the rest of the body as if it were our own, that is when we most truly bear the image of God – the imago dei. We look like Jesus!  That should be exciting!  And I’m very, very excited to meet a whole new part of Christ’s body and to revel in its beauty.

Jesus, you are amazing and your bride is beautiful.

I pray that I will recall and use the ministry training I’ve received these past three years with excellence, that I would not take for granted all that I’ve been privileged to study, and that I would make the most of the teaching and wisdom and training has been entrusted to me.

I want to empower the body so that others may also go and do ministry wherever they are.  I believe that Christ is not bound by the walls of a church building, nor restrained in worship to a time of singing on Sunday, nor limited in his all-encompassing power and plan to redeem the world to himself and crown himself King.  He is sovereign over our greatest mistakes and his will is perfectly effective – not despite our deficiency, but – with our deficiency.  He is amazing, and his body – the church, his glorious bride – is here on earth to bear witness to the coming of a kingdom far greater than any has ever seen.  We are that community. And I hope that wherever we are, we – together – seem to others to bear a remarkably uncanny resemblance to a place we have not been, but have always longed for.

I hope that we bear the image of Christ.

I’m excited to be a part of this.