Prayer is not trying to get God to do what we want, but communicating with him about the issues and circumstances that concern us. It doesn’t happen in a prescribed period each day, but becomes a never-ending conversation where he lets us in on his insight.
I’m beginning to wonder if Israel’s preoccupation with counting horses and chariots whenever they were threatened instead of relying on God to protect and care for them is the same mistake we make when we look to human-designed structures to keep us safe in Jesus. We are still looking to what man can do and not only is it always disappointing in the end, but like Israel’s kings it was always destructive to the people they ruled over. From the beginning of time, God has invited humanity to trust him only with the promise that he will care for us. And our natural proclivities have been to feel safer in structures of our own creation, led by other humans who think they have authority over people and rarely seeing what kind of community God creates if we ceased from our own labors to embrace his.
I’m one person who is far more excited about the church Jesus is building in the world than I am any of man’s attempts to do so. For even within our institutions the real community doesn’t flow from the programs but the interconnections God gives between people who will lovingly care for each other and encourage each other in the journey. We’re going to talk about that this weekend in the first three days of my ten-day trip to Carolina. Twenty of us are meeting in a home on Lake James and see what God has taught us in our journeys and what he might show us together. I have no idea what the outcome might be but you’re sure to read more of it on the blog or hear it on a future podcast. This conversation has been building since The Greater Gathering podcast I did in January.
After those days I’ll be staying another week in the Charlotte and Winston-Salem areas meeting with a variety of people. If you’d like to connect, please check my Travel Page for details. I’ve intentionally left some open time to see what God initiates while I’m there.
In other news, I want to offer my apologies to those of you who have had trouble navigating our website since we made the switch. Unfortunately that was not as smooth a transitiona as I hoped for and the process made it difficult for people to find what they wanted, order from our store, or simply comment on a blog. We have made huge strides this weekend to make the site more user-friendly and I hope if you gave up at some point, you’ll return to have a look around. Though I’m not much for videos, I’m blesed by the feedback we’re getting on my Engage Videos, that are helping people find their way into a meaningful relationship with God, just by encouraging them to recognize how God is building a relationship with them. If you haven’t seen them yet, you might want to check them out.
Finally, I’ve been in constant communication with the brothers and sisters in Kenya. They sent this picture of those pastors and teachers who have gathered to go through The Jesus Lens material to help them share with others a gospel of grace and freedom from the Scriptures, rather than the old distortions they’ve learned in the past to twist people into the religious rules that were part of the Old Covenant, not the new.
I am also working with them in completing the petrol station they are building to fund the ongoing needs of the orphanage we helped them build. We are in the last stages of finding the money to help them complete the service station and are in need of more funds to help us complete it. They have run into some unexpected expenses with an emergency system and some additional land so that large trucks and buses can access where they were required to put the pump. This amount needs to come in quickly as this land is being developed, so if you feel called to help us support these children with this enterprise, we and they would be grateful. If you want to know more about this project or the AIDs recovery home we also support in South Africa, you can see our Sharing With the World page at Lifestream. You can either donate with a credit card there, or you can mail a check to Lifestream Ministries • 1560 Newbury Rd, Ste 1 #313 • Newbury Park, CA 91320. Or if you prefer, we can take your donation over the phone at (805) 498-7774.
It’s the season for new graduates, in high school, colleges, and universities to mark a moment of significant transition in their lives. I don’t know John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars, but I do know truth when I hear it. Here are some excerpts of his recent commencement address to the graduates of Butler University. I hope they listened long enough to let it soak into their bones and influence a thousand decisions they’ll make in the next frew years.
We don’t hear these kinds of words often enough in our culture and yet they are as true as true gets.
I would just note that the default assumption is that the point of human life is to be as successful as possible, to acquire lots of fame or glory or money as defined by quantifiable metrics: number of twitter followers, or facebook friends, or dollars in one’s 401k.
This is the hero’s journey, right? The hero starts out with no money and ends up with a lot of it, or starts out an ugly duckling and becomes a beautiful swan, or starts out an awkward girl and becomes a vampire mother, or grows up an orphan living under the staircase and then becomes the wizard who saves the world. We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness…
You are probably going to be a nobody for a while. You are going to make that journey from strength to weakness, and while it won’t be an easy trip, it is a heroic one. For in learning how to be a nobody, you will learn how not to be a jerk. And for the rest of your life, if you are able to remember your hero’s journey from college grad to underling, you will be less of a jerk. You will tip well. You will empathize. You will be a mentor, and a generous one.
Let me submit to you that this is the actual definition of a good life. You want to be the kind of person who other people — people who may not even be born yet — will think about … at their own commencements. I am going to hazard a guess that relatively few of us thought of all the work and love that Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber put into making this moment possible for us. We may be taught that the people to admire and emulate are actors and musicians and sports heroes and professionally famous people, but when we look at the people who have helped us, the people who actually change actual lives, relatively few of them are publicly celebrated. We do not think of the money they had, but of their generosity. We do not think of how beautiful or powerful they were, but how willing they were to sacrifice for us — so willing, at times, that we might not have even noticed that they were making sacrifices.
(You can see his entire speech here, though I have not and cannot vouch for all he said.)
Sara and I are reading through Ephesians these days and read these words last night in The Message, “You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live.” I hear that sentiment echoed in the words above. The world teaches to pursue the wrong things and I applaud the courage of someone who will speak into the absurdity of false success and invite people into a different way of living where success is not measured the way the world measures it, or even rewards it.
Life is found in embracing our weakness and in doing so find a God so much larger than ourself and a way to live generously in the world. Those people do more to make a difference in the world they live in than the politicians, media moguls, or Wall Street brokers.
Jesus didn’t invite us to follow his rules or traditions about him, he called us to follow him and we do that by learning recognize how he speaks to us.
Engage is our unfolding video series designed to equip and encourage people to explore their own relationship with God. We are adding a new video every two weeks on Wednesday. Of course the most important part of this process is not the videos, but the time and focus you’ll give between them to learn the joy of letting God show you how he wants to build a relationship with you. Living loved is not a matter of embracing a different set of principles about God.
Living loved is the fruit of growing in the “knowing” of God, learning to sense his presence in our life and to cultivate an ongoing conversation with him about what’s going on in your life. As that unfolds, or if you have specific questions you’d like to ask, feel free to share using the comment section of this blog.
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Jesus didn’t invite us to follow his rules or traditions about him, he called us to follow him and we do that by learning recognize how he speaks to us.
While talking with a friend in Australia recently we were celebrating a vast network of friends throughout the world that Father has connected on this journey. The people span continents and yet through travel, Skype, and email connections have found a way to share their journeys together. It is truly friends and friends of friends that just keeps expanding in a simple and marvelous way.
“An unmaintained network,” my friend called, and when I heard it my mind reeled. Yes it is, at least by humans. There’s no mailing list, convention, website, organizational name, or agenda that connects these people; it’s just the strength of their friendships and their willingness to keep in touch with each other as God leads. Jesus holds these friendships together and they have truly been a joy.
We humans try to do so much for God, and what we do always has more of our fingerprints on it than his. And while they can do some good for a limited time, they almost always end up with a lot of futile activity to try to maintain them, almost always with frustrating results. Whether we are managing someone’s spiritual journey, trying to create community, or promoting the next movement that we think will help God’s purpose in the world, we are still looking to human conventions instead of letting him be Head of his church.
Throughout Scripture God keeps inviting us away from human scheming and ingenuity to trust his efforts more than our own. Don’t trust in the size of your army, or the horses and chariots of Egypt, the Israelites were reminded. God trumps them all. Don’t think God lives in building made with human hands, or institutional systems either. His work is so much more vital than that. It an never be housed in something man-made, which is why they always fade in their effectiveness, and why those who think they lead them get sidetracked by their own use of authority.
The best aspects of my life and journey don’t come as the result of human effort, but from simply embracing God’s reality and listening to him as he unfolds his working. That’s why the term ‘unmaintained networks’ caught my heart. We don’t maintain them, because Jesus does. And they are fluid and active, rather than structured by our need for definition and order.
Isn’t that true of everything valuable? It doesn’t result from human effort, but Jesus’ leading. You can encourage someone to know Jesus, but you can’t become their mediator. No lesson plan, discipleship curriculum, how-to book, or bible reading schedules will work for the long haul. They will give us a sense of achievement for awhile, but will not ultimately satisfy. They are human systems and he is so much greater than any of them. You don’t find a life in Jesus by following someone else’s plan, but by learning to engage him in your own heart.
And isn’t the deepest expressions of community risen out of unmanaged relationships? Who knows why we connect with some people more than others, or that some friendships continue to grow and deepen, while ones we work harder at don’t seem to? Jesus knows how to knit his church together and it is a work no human could ever engineer.
Unmediated spirituality, unmaintained community, and unmanaged networks are only that in human terms. By not doing it ourselves, we learn to trust Jesus as the one who mediates, manages, and maintains, and he does it with life-giving joy in the unforced rhythms of grace rather than the rigors of human organization.
It’s this joy that I hope we’re learning as the frailties of even our best human efforts becomes clear. Then we can learn to listen to him as he invites us to engage him and others through friendships of heart and watch his greater gathering of the body, grows in the world.
Some Updates Of Interest:
Wayne and Sara will be in Victoria, BC this weekend meeting with some people on this journey during the day on Saturday. I know it’s late notice, but if you’d like to be included, you can get the details here.
On May 31 – June 10, Wayne will be in North Carolina to host the first Seeding Community conversation for those who are exploring what community might look like outside the box of human-managed programs. He will also be involved in some gatherings throughout the following week, and host a larger gathering on Saturday afternoon and evening in June 8. You can get more details here.
Unmediated Spirituality, Unmanaged Community, and Unmaintained Networks Read More »
It’s good to be back from Australia and catch-up a bit on some sleep and tons of office stuff that piled up in my three-week absence. If you want to hear my reflections on my time in Australia as well as some comments on a recent Barna study that concludes Christians more reflect the spirit of the Pharisees in the world than they do the character of Jesus, check out my latest podcast at The God Journey. But back to Australia, this was as wonderful a time with individual people and being there at incredibly significant moments of God’s revelation to them as I’ve ever had. I watched people come alive on a journey and make incredible shifts in their thinking as God brought them into a greater reality.
Since reading the Birthday Book my daugher assembled for my birthday this year, I’m much more attune to the fact that the way God’s life is passed on in the world is not by books, movies, podcasts, or media of any kind, but simply by the way we treate people around us. If we can find God’s love for us real enough that we live quite naturally in the world aware of and caring for people around us, some incredible things happen. In this vein, what we do intentionally is less significant than those words or actions that just pop out spontaneously as we are simply living in the moment with graciousness. I love that. I want to learn more of it.
I even had time to spend with some of the local wildlife:
Many of you know that Sara had to face down a wildfire while I was gone as it swept up the hill behind our home. It was one of the big ones in California already this spring. Fortunately the winds shifted as it got within a mile or two of our home, but it was a harrowing day indeed for my lady while she was home alone. Graciously a host of friends and family shot over to help her load the critical things and get them off the property in case the fire kept coming. That was a Saturday for me and I felt so far away from her as I got text and Facebook updates. I am so grateful a greater castrophe was averted.
I also stopped by Ireland this week and did a podcast interview for PilgrimTalk. I did stop in via Skype rather than actually go there, but nontheless Anthony was very gracious to me as he posed some questions I didn’t always find easy to answer. It’s brief and you can hear it here.
It’s great to be home. Tomorrow we tape more of the Engage videos. I’m blessed to hear that people are finding these helpful in sorting out their own growing relationship with Father and Son. Other than that, I’ve plowed through a thousand emails, many of them to prepare for my upcoming trip to North Carolina.
With Mother’s Day this weekend and lots of family, as well as a Saturday night gathering of some of the believers who live around us, I can truly say it there is no place like home! I hope that’s true for you, too, even if you’re in difficult circumstances. I know Mother’s Day can be a day of pain for many people, those with wayward children, broken moms, or even missing a mom no longer with us. May you especially be at home in the Father that day and know that he is bigger than any thing this world can dish out on us.
Living in God’s reality doesn’t come by trying to get the things we want from him, but learning to receive what he is already giving us.
Living in God’s reality doesn’t come by trying to get the things we want from him, but learning to receive what he is already giving us.
Engage is our unfolding video series designed to equip and encourage people to explore their own relationship with God. We are adding a new video every two weeks on Wednesday. Of course the most important part of this process is not the videos, but the time and focus you’ll give between them to learn the joy of letting God show you how he wants to build a relationship with you. Living loved is not a matter of embracing a different set of principles about God. Living loved is the fruit of growing in the “knowing” of God, learning to sense his presence in our life and to cultivate an ongoing conversation with him about what’s going on in your life. As that unfolds, or if you have specific questions you’d like to ask me, feel free to use the comment section of this blog because lots of others will probably be interested in the answer as well.
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My trip to Israel in 1997 proved too far more impact on me than I ever thought it could. I promised someday to take Sara there. I wanted her to walk this land where God made Himself known in the world. The time has come to make good on that promise! And you are invited to come along with us and explore the land where love was first revealed.
I had no idea what it would mean on a personal level: to stand on the shore in Galilee one evening, while the water lapped at my feet,to climb Mt. Carmel where Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal, to be surrounded by 2000 year old trees in Gethsemane,to experience pitch-black darkness in the very dungeon that held Jesus the night before He was crucified. Time in Israel gave me a different dimension of understanding for God’s work of redemption. I was drawn closer to His heart. I had touched the earth where He had walked. I had been given a first-hand look at the sky, hills, valleys, and waters where He lived out His physical life. I had experienced His earthly home!
We’re making room for forty people to come with us. As we journey, we’ll walk through the Scripture story. I’ll be sharing some thoughts at key sites designed to stimulate personal reflection. And as we go along, we will enjoy a joint conversation about how God is revealing Himself in us.
The Israel Tour Company, known for intimate tours that allow people to absorb the culture and history of the land, is planning our time. They hosted me years ago, and I am happy to be working with them now. We’ll even have the same guide that I enjoyed so much when I was there all those years ago.
We have chosen to travel in February since the weather is comfortable in the desert locations. There aren’t as many tourists in the country at this time. And we can take a smaller, more intimate group more affordably. The length of the trip is designed to move us through the highlights of the country, still allowing time for reflection and a free day in Jerusalem.
I hope you can join us for an awesome time – one that will forever change your perspective and understanding.
Check out our website below and don’t miss the wonderful video under helpful links.
