Church Love

So let me clarify after my last post: I love the church.

Late last fall I was meeting with a student who was going through a mini-faith-crisis. Some of this was personal, some of it was with the church. We talked some about the person stuff, then I asked her about her struggles with the church.

Her frustrations with the church was the usual cast of characters: the church was full of hypocrisy, the church was picking and choosing which Scriptures to follow, the whole conservative Christian = Republican politics, the church seemed overly-simplistic in how they thought about faith and the world around them, the church didn't serving the poor, the widows, the orphans. The more we talked, the more she got amped up. The church had pretty much failed in every area she could think of.

But here's what became clear as we talked: the category of "the church" wasn't anything that corresponded to any sort of reality. "The church" became a catch-all for every possible negative stereotype and disappointment that she could be frustrated about. "The church" was just a giant pinata for her to work out all her frustrations with just about everything that was wrong with the world.

This happens with my Bible-belt students all the time. They come to UNC, meet thoughtful and critical people from all over the place, and they begin to resent their churched upbringing for not being interested in the things that seem to really matter in the real world.

But here's the problem: "the church" is not just this giant catch-all for all the wrongs in the world. "The Church" is a huge, glorious, stumbling, wonderful, mixed-up community of 2,000 years of broken and redeemed people who are in process. It is not all bad. It is not all good. It is a real, dynamic community of people--people who, according to our own theological understanding of the world, are created in God's image but who are cracked by the fall and by sin.

Without a nuanced understanding of the church, it is easy to either overly-romanticize the church or to overly-condemn the church. Both extremes are simply two sides of the same coin: demanding a perfect Bride for a perfect Christ before Her perfection has been made manifest. One side ignores the ugly parts, the other ignores the beauty that is already being worked out here on earth.

Jesus tells a parable where an enemy sows weeds in with the wheat. The servants ask the master if they should go through and remove the weeds but the master says to wait until the harvest so that none of the good wheat is lost. And so it shall be with the church. There is much that is broken in the church; there are many who claim to be Christ-followers who simply grasp for power, who manipulate, who steal and lie and exploit. They shall be dealt with. But not until the end.

In the mean time, there's two things we know about the church: 1. It is full of broken and messy people who we must not expect either too little or too much from. and 2. Jesus is not ashamed to call Her his beloved Bride. Holding on to both of these helps us to live in the tension of our own experience and understanding and evaluation of "the church" in all its' beauty and brokenness.

Go v. Accommodate

A friend of mine recently told me about a church plant that had as one of its eight core values "incarnational ministry to the city." But when an opportunity presented itself to share the space of an African-American, inner-city church facility, the head pastor evaluated his congregation and said, "we're not ready for that."

My friend went on to reflect that this is a pivotal place of difference between the church and the parachurch. Parachurch ministries have "mission" at the very core of their culture and they can afford to continue to have mission at the forefront of their values. Churches, by contrast. often have to choose between mission and tending to the people in their congregation.

Of course, these two aren't always in tension. But there seems to be critical junctures in the life of Christian organizations when they have to choose between mission and accommodation.

In one of the gospels, Jesus' last words are a resounding "GO!" And that "go" has echoed throughout the past two thousand years of global history--sometimes faithfully, sometimes less than faithfully.

So I love mission. Not at the expense of people but as an opportunity to bless people. And I love the church, especially when it's on mission. And I'm quite content for now to be in para-church world where I don't have to apologize quite so much for having mission at the forefront.

My guess is that one day I'll end up in church-land. Hopefully my experience of mission at the forefront in InterVarsity will be a blessing to me and to the people I have the opportunity to serve and work with.

Jesus Suffers

A quick look back over the first five chapters of Hebrews and one thing is clear: before Jesus Sits, Jesus Suffers.

Here are some of the highlights of Jesus' suffering:

-Jesus suffers death so that he might taste death for everyone (2:9)
-Jesus suffers in order that he might be made perfect (2:10)
-Jesus suffers to be able to help us/empathize and sympathize with us in our own struggles (2:18)
-Jesus suffers in order to learn obedience (5:8)

There's a couple of take-homes here.

First, Jesus is God become human. The "lowest common denominator" in all our shared humanity is suffering. Certainly suffering is not distributed equally across all people.; indeed, some seem to get through life with very little obvious suffering. But suffering is nevertheless the most commonly shared experience in all of humanity. We suffer, and so Jesus does as well.

But second, notice that there's always an "in order to" or "so that" attached to Jesus' experiences of suffering. Jesus enters into suffering not merely to experience it and so to throw a meaner pity-party for us when we, too, enter into suffering. Instead, Jesus enters into the full experience of suffering in the land of the ruins and he redeems it.

The tragedy of life here among the ruins is not that some suffer but that some suffer without purpose, without some sort of redemptive benefit on the other side. Jesus enters into all our suffering and he does so in order to ensure that for all who will trust him, walk in him, live in him, for all who would be united with him, all our sufferings might be forced to serve us rather than the other way around. The tyrant of suffering which once held us captive has now become our servant. In Christ, all of our hardships must bless us.

Of course, we do have a critical role to play in this. Apart from faith-full perseverance sufferings can bear the fruit of cynicism and despair and bitterness in our hearts. And so the call from the Scriptures to hold on, to walk in this way by faith no matter what. The promised rest for our souls is ahead.

Home

I've been gone this week at Regional InterVarsity staff meetings. Mid-way through my thirteenth year on campus, I continue to be grateful and impressed with the quality of our Regional leadership and the quality of campus staff that we hire. There aren't many jobs where your supervisors care as much about you as a person as they do about the job you've been hired to do. There aren't many jobs where your co-workers are one hundred percent quality people.

And so last night as we wrapped up our time together, I was actually a little sad. Our Regional staff team is spread out across Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. There are many friends working in far-off places that I see only rarely.

But then this afternoon I walked through the door. And there was my four-year-old son, Davis. With a sweet smile and a big hug he ran up to me with the best greeting any daddy could receive: "I missed you daddy."

Son, I missed you too. It's good to be home.

Redemption's Marker

At the end of last school year I wrote a letter to friends and supporters saying that I had never had a harder year. And really it was at this time last year that the cacophony came to it's zenith.

Last year at this time on campus the number of students in spiritual, emotional and/or academic crisis was overwhelming. Last year at this time on campus I was embroiled in more conflicts with students than I've ever been before--some of it was my fault or made worse by how I handled the situation, some of it was making hard, right decisions that my staff team and I took heat for.

I have to fundraise to be on campus. That is, friends and family and local churches and alumni give money each year to pay my salary and expenses and all that. This can be a serious place of stress and difficulty for many staff. But I'd never had any troubles raising my budget...until last year. The money wasn't coming in as it had in the past. And I wasn't sure where it would come from.

Last year at this time at home, we were in serious financial anxiety. In the previous twelve-ish months we had over $10,000 in home and auto repair that had wiped out our savings. We were one blown head gasket or water pipe bursting away from having to consider doing something fairly drastic like sell our house or a body part on Ebay. And we were stressed.

And so I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment as I've been thinking about redemption to set up redemption's marker.

Last Friday afternoon I met with my last group of students for the semester. As I walked across campus and towards my car, I was teary-eyed. While no semester of ministry with students is pain or drama-free, this semester has been a very sweet one. I've seen the Lord deliver students from hard places. I've seen the Lord take young leaders and mold them into wise and strong ones. I've seen students move from places of isolation and loneliness to making significant decisions for community that has paid off in much blessing. I have seen God work and bless and multiply the ministry.

It has been a sweet, sweet semester on campus.

Last summer, the Lord raised up donors to help to keep me on campus. A couple of major donors literally contacted me out of the blue to ask if they could support me. God has provided.

At home, we had the addition of Emma Kate in early September. Before she was born I looked at the calendar and thought that by the time mid-December rolled around, we'd be more or less toast. Given the track record of our first two kids, sleep was not going to be had for the first eight to twelve months.

But for the most part she has been a dream baby. She is laid back and flexible and she sleeps like a champ. And now she readily gives sweet smiles to her mom and dad and big brother and big sister.

And so I head into this Christmas season with much to be thankful for. I have already received a bevy of gifts from the Lord. Gratitude to the Lord does not come as easily for me as complaining to him does. This redemption's marker is one way for me to help change that.

Redemption

Some fight against this offer of living life under the umbrella of grace and mercy on the grounds that they would much rather stand or fall on their own merit rather than have their fate decided by someone or something else.

Good luck with that.

If redemption is the universal cry of our souls, what sign or proof do we have either in our own personal experience or the experience of human history that we are able to secure that redemption for ourselves?

Redemption, that is the making right of all the broken places in our lives, seems to require some sort of in-breaking from the outside. To draw upon my eleventh grade chemistry recollections, if our lives are "closed systems" then we are stuck with our own baggage and redemption is impossible. If all of human history is a closed system then humanity as a whole is doomed.

But the Christian story is that the precise in-breaking that is needed to turn the story around has happened. When we were stuck in our regrets and guilt and shame, God came to get us. God himself has become one of us, entered into our regrets and guilt and shame and finally into death itself and overcome all of it. He has redeemed all of History in precisely the only way it could be redeemed.

And so you and I don't have to struggle and strive for the redemption our souls long for. It has been fought for and won already on our behalf and it's now offered to us as a free gift.

Merry Christmas.

Jesus Sits Part Two

Here's what I know about you: you've got stuff. Something you did. Something you didn't do. A regret. A period of your life when things were messy.

Here's what I know about you: in order to put as much distance between you and that stuff, you try to do things. If you're an over-achiever, you work hard to over-achieve. If you're a thrill-seeker, you thrill-seek. Maybe you watch t.v. or watch movies or smoke pot or drink or go to church or help out at a homeless shelter or throw great parties.

But here's the problem with that: all that baggage doesn't go away. Memories haunt us. A picture, a word, a phrase, a smell, sometimes just for no reason whatsoever it just all comes back. And we realize that no matter how hard we try to put the pedal down and try to convince ourselves that all of that is behind us, we can never put enough distance between our baggage and who we are today to live free.

The earliest Christians were adamant about a number of things: 1. Jesus is Lord. 2. We are not. 3. That is good news.

Of course, it never sounds like good news. The original temptation was "you'll be like God." And so the whole history of humanity is about people trying to live out God-delusions. With the amount of wealth and technology, 21st century Americans live it out about as "well" as any people in the history of the world.

But here's why it's good news for you and for me today that Jesus Sits as Lord; why it's good news that He's Lord and you and I are not. If He is Lord then your crap does not have the last word on you. Jesus does.

Your baggage that is just a breath away from all crashing down on you today does not define you. He does. What Jesus has to say about you is the most true thing about you, not the voices in your head. You are not Lord of your own life. Jesus is. His work and word defines you, not your work and words.

Some people spend their whole lives attempting to escape this reality. But we don't have to. This is a gift. To be free from the tyranny of our baggage of shame, regret, anger and guilt and to live under the umbrella of grace and mercy and love is the invitation of Christmas.

Jesus is Lord. You and I are not. Hope has the last word on you today. And He has already won.

Good News for the Self-Conscious

Here's a piece of good news for those of you who struggle with anxiety about what others might think about you:

No one thinks about you nearly as much as you think that they do.

There, doesn't that feel better?

Breaking out Christmas

Over the weekend we got the tree from Lowe's (I know, how suburbanite depressing) and decked the living room and play room with all sorts of Christmas decor and knick-knacks. I love Christmas time and getting the Christmas stuff out. It's just so much stinkin' fun.

Last week my good friend Marshall had a post where he offered up his favorite Christmas music. Mostly I've got a random collection of random stuff, but I've got my top 3 that I will hereby share with you:

3. Amy Grant's "Home for Christmas." This cd got me through some dark days in college--I was playing it in March to try to not be depressed and it mostly worked.

2. Charlie Brown Christmas Album. Some of the sweetest, laid-back cool, pensively warm songs ever written and performed, captured for our enjoyment. You can get this one at your local Starbucks, which I did last year. Best $15 I'd spent until...

1. Handel's Messiah. I downloaded this on Itunes a couple weeks ago and I cannot stop listening to it. Some of this is because of the memories--my mom is a choir director and I feel like I grew up listening to her practice it with her choirs at least a half-dozen times. But the richness of the Scriptures and the power of the music has really carried me into this Advent season.

Jesus Sits

I'm reading Hebrews in my time with the Lord right now. I'm also attempting to lead our church small group through it, although I must say I am doing so with mixed results. It's a new group and I've done such an average job of leading that I'm afraid to tell them that I train small group leaders for a living.

Hebrews is one of the hardest books of the Bible to understand. It's also sometimes called "the fifth gospel" because it focuses so much on the person and work of Jesus Christ. The first few chapters have made for surprisingly good Advent reading. Preparing for Christmas in the midst of everything that leads up to Christmas takes a lot of work for me.

One of the things that Hebrews is big on is that Jesus is sitting. The author (whoever he or she might be, no one's quite sure) mentions it throughout the book. Jesus does all this crazy stuff and then he sits down.

One of the dominant compare/contrasts that the author of Hebrews works throughout the book is Jesus as compared to the Old Testament high priests. The high priests are the religious leaders who offered sacrifices on behalf of the Jewish people, the most significant being the sacrifice on the day of atonement.

I once heard a sermon on this whole idea of Jesus sitting in Hebrews. The speaker was pointing out that in the Old Testament we have a pretty detailed description of the temple and there was no place for the high priests to sit. There were no chairs in the temple. That's because the work of the high priest was never, ever done. There were always more sacrifices to be offered. Every week, every month, every year the sacrifices had to be made over and over and over again.

So here's where it gets good: Jesus is the high priest who sits down. It is finished. There is no more sacrifice to be made for sin. Not for my sin. Not for your sin. Sin and death no longer have the last word. Jesus does. Life does. No one has to do anything more to take care of our guilt, our shame, or our regret. We don't have to try to work it off or perform better to try to make up for what we've done. We don't need someone else to present a sacrifice for us. Jesus is Lord over all things and so Jesus sits. Hope wins.

Jesus sits. Good news for you and for me this week as we start a new week and a new month that culminates in the celebration of the birth of our Great High Priest who loves us and who died to take care of all of our junk for us.

Entitlement

Last night at our large group we had a speaker named Nairy Ohani. Nairy has spent most of the past fifteen years serving as a missionary overseas in Armenia and most recently in Turkey.

She told lots of positive, warm-fuzzy stories about God's work while she was abroad. She was also honest about how hard it was to deal with things like police harassment and many years of labor without always seeing concrete results.

She summed up one of her stories profoundly: "God does not owe you anything just because you do the right thing."

Entitlement is a cultural pandemic. It is woven into the basic framework of our country: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These are not bad things. I rather enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But spiritually, this breeds a consumerist mentality about God that is utterly repugnant. The whiny demanding-ness of our entitlement issues is uttered loud and clear when it comes to thoughts on God. Both the vaguely spiritual and the committed Christian feel that God has basically let them down on his end of the bargain...whatever that is. Remember a song from the late '90's? A band called Dog's Eye View and the song is called "Everything Falls Apart:"

I met God this afternoon ridin' on an uptown train
I said, "Don't you have better things to do?"
He said, "If I do my job what would you complain about?

Nairy's comments cut me to the quick. If I do what God wants, I feel like he owes me to come through for me exactly how I think he should. To let go of that frees me up to then receive what he actually has for me.

Why do I think that God should throw me a parade when I do the right thing? Is that really all that commendable?

Who's Got Time to Blog?

In the last two days I've met with exactly twelve students, all one-on-one.

The topics of discussion have included the following: predestination and
freewill, how does prayer work, do all religions lead to God, homosexuality,
the problem of evil (twice), dysfunctional community and unhealthy
relationships, breaking up with a significant other, dealing with family
issues that came up over Thanksgiving, Guatemala or East Africa, Romania or
China, obey God or honor parents, depression, and putting the finishing
touches with my Coordinating Team on plans for next semester which could
quite possibly be the most creative and thoughtful semester of ministry that
I've ever been a part of in my thirteen years on campus.

Good thing the semester wraps up next week. I get a whole lot more done
around here without all these students getting in the way.

Ordinary Time

So I'm still getting used to this whole being Anglican thing--I think it's starting to grow on me. Anglicanism, for those of you who aren't familiar with the 2.5 billion branches of Protestantism, is a fairly high-church, more liturgical church tradition.

One of the key components of the church life in this setting is the church calendar. Rather than just the normal stuff like Christmas and Easter, the whole year is marked: Advent, for example, is the weeks leading up to Christmas and then Christmas itself is twelve days (hence the 12 Days of Christmas song).

There's a long stretch in the church calendar during the fall called "Ordinary Time." So called, I suppose, because it's rather, well...ordinary.

A couple of weeks ago I was meeting with a student who asked me a simple question: "What's up with you?" I realized that I didn't really have much to report. I sort of floundered through a couple of perfunctory comments about the kids and my overall sense of the ministry on campus.

But as I was doing so, I realized that this might be a good thing to talk about. I stopped myself from running my yapper pointlessly and started to think out loud.

In a culture that is obsessed with adrenaline, how do we process life when there's no headline news? What about "ordinary time?" Is it enough, as the Scriptures invite, simply to "do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?"

This seems to me to be a pretty critical skill to develop. Most of our life is spent in ordinary time. Figuring out how to savor the times between the high's and the low's seems to be fairly critical if the life of faith is to actually have much bearing on the life of real people.

Thankful to Who? For What?

So Thanksgiving was originally a bunch of religious folks thanking God for bringing them safely to "the new world." Of course, it can't stay that way today. As a culture we're more or less done with God and we're deeply conflicted about how we treated people in this "new world" once we got here.

So the question is, what do we do with this Thanksgiving thing?

I'm not sure I've got an answer for the "what" question. I think that what our ancestors did to the natives here was pretty atrocious. National repentance is really the only answer. But I don't anticipate that happening any time soon.

But the question of "thankful to who?" is one that we've got to deal with. "Thanksgiving" makes for a poor noun. It's supposed to be a verb. We're never thankful in normal life apart from someone, an object, to be thankful to.

Have you ever had someone start out complimenting you and end up complimenting themselves? Or have someone start out thanking you but end up in vague, vapid sentimentalism? I think that these are basically the only options we have for God-less thanks giving.

The sane among us know that we have much to be thankful for. But since we've taken God out of the equation, we don't have an outlet for that thanks. So thanks-giving, which is a gloriously humbling and excellent 'bringing us back down to earth' exercise whenever we do it, suddenly just becomes yet another exercise in self-aggrandizement now that God is no longer the one that we have over us to give thanks to.

Or it becomes just another chance to reflect on nice things. How very nice.

Again, I'm not real sure what the solution is. I'm not advocating for a return to some glory days of America the Christian nation (I'm not sure those ever existed). I'm simply saying that the impulse to give thanks is a right and proper one. And to take away the object of that thanks giving is to create more moral and spiritual confusion, since that's the whole point of this whole thing called life anyway.

Thanksgiving Grab Bag

O, how I love Thanksgiving!  Let me introduce you to my three "F's" of Thanksgiving:

1. Food.  In my family here in Concord, NC (just north of Charlotte), food is an art.  Yesterday was no exception.  Glorious sides of homemade cranberry salad, squash, homemade yeast rolls, homemade stuffing (including oysters), and lots more to go along with a great turkey and ham.

2. Family.  We gathered together at Aunt Wendy's and Uncle Wesley and Bradley's house in Mooresville for Thanksgiving along with Oma and Opa and Uncle Steve.  Davis turns 4 on Saturday and we'll have the same crowd plus a bunch more coming in from Pennsylvania and Georgia to celebrate.

3.  Football.  Some seriously great football going on this weekend. The Packers and Cowboys both looked sharp on Thanksgiving day in their tune-up before they go head-to-head next Sunday afternoon to see who's the best in the NFC.  I just finished watching LSU get knocked off by Arkansas in triple overtime to once again upset the BCS applecart.  All I really want for Christmas is a playoff system!

Lastly, allow me to introduce you to a favorite chorus of mine around the holidays.  It's to the tune of "Country Roads," that 1970's classic by John Denver, just a little re-written for the next generation...

Suburban roads
take me home
to the subdivision
where I belong!
Greater Charlotte
suburban sprawl,
take me home,
suburban roads.

God as the Nucleus

[This post is an excerpt of an e-mail exchange with a student after my talk from a couple of weeks ago]

Hey Alex,

The one line that stuck out to me from your talk was when you said that you came to realize that you were afraid of putting God in the center of your life because you're afraid that He wouldn't give you what you want. I'm in that exact spot. To make a silly metaphor, I'm in astronomy right now and we briefly discussed the make-up of an atom. God isn't my nucleus - he's my 1st energy level - the closest you can get to the center without being the center. The problem is making that change.

I think that relationships are my nucleus - although my relationships (or lack thereof) with guys are the main kind, it's also the relationships with my friends and family as well. I have such a hard time being ok with being single. It's been over a year since my last relationship and I'm tired of being lonely. I know God should fill that void, but it's hard to let Him occupy that space.

So what do I do now? It's hard to know what you SHOULD do and not know HOW to do it.

Thanks for listening!
-E
-------------------
Dear E,

a couple of random thoughts:

First, there's no magic formula for this. the process of allowing God to be at the center of your life is just that--a process. You've got 18-21 years of NOT living that way to overcome, which is a lot to try to "undo!"

Second, I really believe that the life of a Christian is a life of repentance. We become more like Christ, we discover what it means to live life more freely and fully as we see our sin, ask for forgiveness, and turn away from it. So what maturity means for a lot of our lives is that we shorten the 'lag time' between seeing our sin and repenting of it.

Third, I think that you've got to learn to both hate your sin and love the life that's offered in Christ for something better. We all sin because we think it's going to benefit us, right? That's the original lie in the garden, it's the same lie I believe every day. So part of our work is to not just know cognitively that somethings wrong or off, but to really think through and envision the consequences of a life lived in messed up ways.

So for me, to continue to live my life with people at the center rather than God would basically put me in the place where people had way too much power over me. It wasn't good for them or me--if people didn't make me feel good about myself (which is a ton of pressure on them) then I was a wreck.

When my identity and security and confidence is rooted in Christ, I'm freed up to be a way better friend. I can love more recklessly. It's less about me and more about actually loving others rather than trying to get something out of them, trying to suck life out of them that they can't really ever give to me.

Knowing that, picturing how great it would be to actually live like that pushes me to really dig into the scriptures to begin to understand my identity in Christ. Galatians and Romans have been critical in my understanding of what it means that I'm a child of God first and foremost. that understanding and subsequent attempts to live that out has been the story of my walk with Jesus for most of my adult life...

Chapter Retreat Re-cap

It's probably a sign of old age and maturity that on Friday afternoon as the sinuses in my head grew ever-more clogged I realized the wisdom of my wife's appeal to me that driving a couple hours to chapter retreat and then getting no sleep that night would not be a good idea.

So I went down to campus, helped everyone get on their merry way and went home and went to bed early. The next morning I drove a gloriously fall-painted two and a half hours up to Yale, Virginia, and got there before the morning session began.

The seniors who shared over the course of the weekend did a great job blending vulnerability and honesty with the hope of change and the good news of tastes of redemption in the hard places.

The theme of "How to lose your life in 3 days" was expressed thoughtfully and thoroughly by each of the six seniors who shared over the course of the weekend what it looked like for them to follow Jesus into redemption in the midst of their own struggles with control, family, identity, depression, and GPA-drivenness.

I think that the reason why almost everyone likes movies or stories with redemptive themes is because that longing for redemption of those hard times or broken places is hard-wired in our souls. We were made for perfection. We don't have it. And so we long for things to be made right, don't we?

And I appreciate even more so when I hear concrete, real-life stories where that redemption, that making-things-right, is happening in real-time. Often less "neat" than a movie, but all the more real because of it. It anchors me in hope.

Saturday night is men's and women's prayer. We break up along gender lines, sit in a circle, put one chair in the middle, and invite people to get prayer for whatever they need prayer for. Each year incredible stuff comes up during this time: issues with alcohol and drugs, family, guilt from things in the past, sexual sin, loneliness and brokenness and the like. For many, it's the first confession of something they've been dealing with and thus is the first step in the process of healing. We almost always have to cut that time off with more people wanting to talk.

Sunday morning all 142 students packed it up and left. And I left grateful for the good work God's doing in our chapter to press us into deeper places of life and redemption as we lose our lives for him and his sake that we might find them again.

Weekend Request

Tomorrow around 5:00 140-ish UNC IV students will be rolling out to Chapter Retreat. This is always a favorite retreat both for the students and for me.

Seniors really lead this retreat and the theme they selected for this coming weekend is "How to Lose Your Life in 3 Days." They're talking about what happens when life doesn't quite turn out how you expected it: majors fall through, relationships don't work out, etc. A number of seniors will be sharing honestly about their struggles through college...and what it means to trust in the Lord when life happens to your plans.

All of this is continuing to work out our vision for this year of "a missional community of grace living out Jesus' invitation to raw, intentional, transformational relationships in order to bless the campus."

We'd love your prayers for this weekend. Specifically for new folks who are coming--be they freshmen or just new to the community over the course of this semester. We'd love prayer for the seniors who are speaking. We'd love to come back from the weekend with a deeper sense of family doing life together in the Lord.

One of the things that I've been most moved by this past week as I've talked with students about our vision statement and as we're planning for next semester is how Jesus did it. He didn't change the world by writing a book. He called people to himself in the context of a community. He started with people. Jesus calls us to himself to be in community; community is designed to point us to Jesus...who points us back to community. It's a cynergistic feedback loop that is designed to bless us, stretch us, change us.

We'd love to see that developed and cultivated more deeply over the next sixty hours...and pray for my strength and health, as I've got more snot in my head than I thought was humanly possible right now...

Love Is...

...my wife telling me to go to bed as I fight my head cold rather than post on my blog tonight.

The Children Sleep

Here is Emma Kate's 2-month picture that we took of her last week next to her giraffe. This is in part to give perspective. For those of you who are new to Piebald Life, we stole this idea from some friends of ours. By taking a monthly picture with the same stuffed animal you really get a sense of how quickly they're growing and how big they're getting.

Perhaps even the least detail-oriented of you will notice she's definitely asleep.

I have ranted in this space before about our children's sleeplessness (see Prayer and Cursing for a particularly frustrated post). So let me also use the blogosphere to trumpet the good news: our children are turning into solidly good sleepers.

Emma Kate is a dream. At eight weeks old she has already put in multiple 10-plus hour nights of straight sleep. To put that in perspective, on Davis' baby calendar we celebrated a night of four straight hours of sleep at around six or seven months. Emma Kate has some rough days, but on the whole she is a tremendously gifted sleeper.

Davis and Zoe, meanwhile have come around some as well. For eight straight weeks from early-August on they were getting up between 5:15 and 5:45. Every. Single. Day. No weekends.

Now they're consistently sleeping to 6:30 and some days even eek into the 7:00 range. This is heaven.

Of course I love 'em no matter how well they do or don't sleep. But sleep definitely makes it easier...