Sara and I are off to South Africa for a two week tour that will take us from Johannesburg through to Cape Town. After two days in the Pretoria/Johannesburg area, I will be doing a retreat near Ladysmith, a relational church gathering in Pietermaritzburg, helping an HIV/AIDs outreach in the township of Ntuzuma, teaching an AIDS Outreach Workers school at a YWAM base in Durban, and then finishing in Cape Town with some media interviews and gatherings with brothers and sisters ont he journey. We are looking forward to our time with many people we have met before and some we’ve only corresponded with by email.

Thus, our offices will be closed from October 20 through November 3. We will have someone coming by to fill out orders for those who order via PayPal. We will also try to monitor phone messages as best we can, but we probably won’t return any until November 4. I’m sorry for any complication that causes you, but we’re just a couple of people trying to help others on this journey as best we can. Our Internet access and time to spend dealing with email will be severely limited during this time. If you can at all wait until we return to send us email, it will be much appreciated. If you send it anyway, please be patient as we try to respond. This is a very intensive trip to spend as much time with various people as we can. Some of my books are just releasing in Afrikaans and The Shack has been going strong in South Africa for over two years in English and was recently released in Afrikaans as well.

If you think of us while we’re away, please pray for us and the purposes God wants to unfold in the lives of the people we’ll be spending time with. Thanks.

For those who follow the God Journey on Disc, rather than subscribing to the podcast, our fifth archive disc is now available. This includes the high quality version of our podcasts from November 2008 through August 2009. It includes over 40 podcasts and is available from Lifestream for $12.00 each, or you can pick up all five discs for $40.00.

These discs contain mp3 data files and will not play in a regular CD player. They will however play on our computer, most DVD players, and, of course, mp3 players.

While you’re at it, visit our new God Journey website, which has been recently redesigned to streamline the content as well as make it more accessible. We’re still tweaking the archive pages, but they should be ready in a week or so. Brad and I enjoy getting together talking about this incredible journey and watching how those conversations encourage others as well. As you’ll see on the podcasts, some of our listener email is the best anywhere. I love what God is speakign to hearts all over the world and how gracefully peple are learning to live in him.

“I’ve heard that there are two kinds of Christians in the world,” the young woman said perched on the couch of a home I visited lately. “People either see God as mad or sad.” On a normal day, that would have sounded fine to me. Either he is mad at our sin and wants to blast the world into oblivion, or he is sad over our sin and hopes to rescue us. Of those two, I’d choose the latter.

But the way God works these things out, I’d had breakfast earlier in the day with a group of men and one of them said that the truth that began his exploration of a greater journey was when he’d heard someone say that God is the most joyful presence in the universe.

So when I heard he was either sad or mad, I was already alert to a third alternative. Mad or sad still focuses on us and our sin. Isn’t it interesting how we are taught in religion to view God through our sin, not to view God beyond our sin? Instead of celebrating the essential nature of God at work in a broken world to rescue us to himself, we’re left to sulk in the brokenness and failures of this temporal age.

Jesus told his disciples the night before he died that he was telling them all these things so that his joy to be in them and for their joy to be full. This is his passion, to see us find the same joy in the Father that he knew. When Jesus said that he was only hours away from his trial and crucifixion. He said it despite the fact that his countrymen lived under the repression of Roman rule. He said it in the face of a world still being devastated by sin, disease, war and great pain. And in the face of all of that he let’s us see that God is neither mad or sad in his creation. He is the most joyful presence above it and inside of it.

It is that joy that he came to share with us—a joy that consumes any pain, trial, failure, or struggle we might be in at the moment. It is a joy deeply based on the pleasure of God, his desire for us and his unfolding purpse in the world. He invites us to live in that space with him and let it prevail over the temporal pains of the world we live in. Paul called those “momentary, light afflictions” that produce in us an “eternal weight of glory.” This was the apostle who’d been stoned numerous times, shipwrecked three times, robbed on his journeys and lied about by close friends. Obviously he was focused on something far greater and far grander than those circumstances.

The joy Jesus spoke about is not temporal and thus swings with the fickle tides of circumstance. It goes deeply into his own character and purpose unfolding in this broken world.

That’s where I want to live—every day, in every situation. And, boy, do I have a ways to go there.

I hope you have a blessed weekend. Sara and I are getting read for our trip to South Africa for the next two weeks.

I got this email the other day. I love the journey this dear sister is on, even if it is a bit disorienting at the moment. Listen to her heartbeat. There are so many like her and I’m blessed that God is waking us up to find greater life and freedom in him, wherever he places us:

My parents gave me your book He Loves Me and I have been listening to your podcasts. My parents are currently finding a lot of freedom from guilt-based living after many years of service in a traditional church.  Its exciting to see their passion for Christ reawakened after the burden of religion has been lifted.

For me, I am in a very wounded place, but I appreciate your message as it seems at its core it is simply the Gospel message. I have spent the last ten years in the organic church movement, thinking I had found somewhere where we were all passionate about the true message of Christ and were free from the religious abuse of programmatic church.  Now I find that its simply religion without a building, another system, only it just doesn’t look like one.

I appreciate that you are advocating for Christ, for love, for simple Gospel message. I really thought that it is what we were about.  I feel more wounded coming out of that setting than I ever felt in a traditional church setting.  In fact, now I find myself back in the traditional church where I grew up, feeling guilty for participating in “religious church,” but realizing that i have a lot of friends there, a lot of relationships.  I feel like I am always looking back and forth, wondering who is God, have I really lost the faith by returning to a traditional church, will I inevitably become a Pharisee by hanging out there, was I really one before? I don’t know.  

I listen to your podcasts and you talk about living by God’s love and grace and I that is how it began with our little group, then it was about the movement, about the sacrifice, about the five fold leadership, and somewhere in there I lost that simple Christ message.  But I see it everywhere; its in individual people, people in a Baptist churches, in Episcopal churches, in Orthodox churches, sometimes I even seem to see a glimmer of it in people who claim to be atheist.  And religious striving… I find it everywhere too.  I wasn’t half the Pharisee I was in a traditional church as I became trying to escape it.  Oh, to return to that simple faith of a child…  washed white as snow.

I loved this statement: I wasn’t half the Pharisee I was in a traditional church as I became trying to escape it.” I’ve seen people struggle with that same reality. Whenever we give ourselves to movements and look down on others who don’t share what we do, we are in danger of even being more captive to our hope for revival, than we were even to our religious obligation systems.

And I pray she finds real peace in him and lets go of the guilt and second-guessing. Then she can find the real joy and contentment wherever God chooses to place her to engage his people and his life with freedom.

Sara and I are wandering around New England at the moment and will be up in Maine over the weekend with a host of believers. But I couldn’t wait to tell you about Bo’s Café that came to me a year ago in manuscript form. It was a bit rough, but I fell in love with the characters and their story and the lessons of grace that lace each page. I found myself weeping at the end in a climatic conversation that touched me deeply. Then we got a chance to work on it with the authors who wanted to make it a Windblown book. Brad and I helped shape the story a bit and edit them in a final re-write. I love how it came out.

Bo’s Café was released last week. It was written by the authors of Truefaced, John Lynch, Bill Thrall, and Bruce McNicol. This amazing story chronicles a young man whose life is being torn apart by his own anger, and confronts the reality of grace that unfolds in a way that takes him by surprise and makes him face the darkest corners of his heart. It’s available everywhere at the moment.

This is NOT a marriage book, but I still want to offer this warning. Guys, read this book before your wife does. If she reads it first she’s going to beg you to read it. If you don’t she’s going to put it on your nightstand and threaten not to have sex with you again until you do!

OK, that might be a bit overstated and I don’t sanction anyone holding sex expression hostage to getting their own way, but if you let the content of this story sink into your heart. You’ll be a better husband, or wife, or friend, or colleague, or brother or sister. Grace can change us in ways that law and performance never will. God knows that. He wants you to know it too!

Pick it up. You won’t regret it. We did an interview about the book four our podcast last week with the authors. If you haven’t heard it, you might want to give it a listen.

Tomorrow morning I leave for Canada, Toronto to be exact. I’m connecting with some old friends and new ones up that way.

On Saturday I will be doing an interview with Drew Marshall on his radio show that runs throughout Canada. He has been a real fan of THE SHACK and my SO YOU DON’T WANT TO GO TO CHURCH ANYMORE book. I have been on his show by phone a few times. I’m looking forward to spending some time in studio with him. You can listen live on line if you like. I’ll be on Saturday 4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, or 1:00 Pacific Daylight Time. They also podcast the show and archive it if you want to listen later.

On Monday I’m moving on to Maine for a week with friends from throughout New England. Sara will be joining me for that part of the trip.

If you tried to get on the Lifestream-related websites today, you already known we were hacked. I have spent most of the day just getting things back to normal. That included the Lifestream site as well as The God Journey site. It has truly been a mess. So if you had a difficult time navigating our sites or saw the disgusting splash page put up on The God Journey blog, you have my sincere apologies.

I’m even more convinced today that hacking, virus-creating and spamming ought to be capital offenses. They cause no end of time, expense and hassle, all because people want to make mischief, mostly for their own amusement or ranking in the dark side of the Internet.

The Internet is an environment that is totally man-created, not subject to any of the sicknesses and disease that wage war against our bodies. And in this pristine environment some have found joy in creating diseases, hacking people’s efforts, and trying to hijack other people’s work for profit or amusement. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? If sin hadn’t brought sickness into the world, then surely we would have done it to ourselves. Doing harm to others, exploiting people’s vulnerabilities, and creating hardship for self-gain is where the seamier side of human nature sinks.

So the next time you’re tempted to blame God for all the evil, sickness and pain in the world, maybe you might want to consider that it isn’t God’s doing at all. This is what human nature allows and what it thrives on. We don’t always do it in such overt ways as the Internet junk squad, but every time we think of ourselves above the people around us, treat our needs as more important than the person next to us, or wittingly or unwittingly create hardship for others we add to the brokenness of our world.

Conversely, whenever we put others above ourselves, act in kindness toward another person or seek to heal the brokenhearted we participate in God’s unfolding kingdom in the world. See Luke 4:18-19, where Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah. There’s two very opposite spirits at work in the world. He is not the destroyer; he is the redeemer.

For folks in the Southern California area who are interested, I’ll be speaking at GRACE HARVEST (formerly Moorpark Vineyard Community Church), which currently meets at The Lighthouse Christian Fellowship 4823 Mira Sol Dr. • Moorpark, Ca 93021. Service starts at 9:00 a.m., so you have to get up early!

Last weekend when I was in Raleigh, NC, I was interviewed by the Open Heaven website folks about my writing and sharing around the world. Some of you might find that of interest. You can find the article here.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about watching the International Space Station and Space Shuttle arch across the sky. Well, for those in the Southern California area the next three nights offer very similar views. It will appear as a bright light moving from west to east and brighter than any star and moves quite rapidly arching from horizon to horizon in about three minutes.

There’s a great pass on Saturday evening between 8:05 PM and 8:08 PM (depending on your location, the times might be slightly different).

There’s another pass on Sunday evening, from 8:30 PM to 8:33 PM.

And another on Monday, 7:19 PM to 7:24 PM.

For details you can visit, visit http://www.heavens-above.com/