Friendships & Life Stages & Partying Until 8:30 P.M.

I was talking with a friend of mine on staff with IV in Charlotte who's wife just had their second kid. We were talking about the challenges of trying to have legitimate peer friendships while juggling work (in our case, very relational work) and growing demands of family.

I think that my relational hey-day was probably college. When else do you have that kind of incidental time with people all doing the exact same thing as you?

The two single years in between college and marriage were harder places to find community Even in a church where there were lots of other single twenty-somethings, we were all scurrying about trying to make our way through degree programs or getting started with this new work thing.

Post-college, I think that the easiest time relationally was married, no kids.

In some ways, making friends when married got more complicated. The question wasn't just if I clicked with a guy. It was I had to click with the guy and I had to be able to at least tolerate the wife. And then my wife had to click with the wife and at least be able to tolerate the husband. Fortunately, we worked through this gauntlet with a number of great couples while in Richmond, Va, particularly at West End Pres.

But I think it got easier for me after I got married because for the most part women are just better at initiating with one another. Marriage for me meant that I got invited/tagged along to a lot more events, more parties, more places where people were hanging out.

Maybe I was just lame before and now that I had a super-cool wife, I got to ride her coat tails. This is one perfectly reasonable explanation (and perhaps I need to just deal with it). But I think that at least part of the reason is that men struggle to initiate with one another and with women...well, it's gets complicated and messy sometimes, but at least they get things off the ground relationally.

Then kids come along, of course, and they act as 6-pound, 8-oz wrecking balls through your social life. If the kid has to be in bed by 7:30, you've got to be there, too. There's laws about that sort of thing.

And now at ages 6, 4, and 3, our kids are starting to enter into the world of birthday parties and 2.5 soccer games every weekend, so our discretionary time is approaching nil.

I'm in a season right now of being very grateful for some close friends but also feeling how busy life gets and how hard it is to maintain friendships. Kelly and I had dinner with some friends last weekend. We started the e-mail thread trying to find a date back in April. That's six months, people. That's ridiculous.

I've always rolled my eyes at some people's celebration of relationships that they don't bother to keep up with but "can always pick up as if we had just talked yesterday." Seriously? What kind of community is that? It always sounded lame and shallow and lonely to me. But I'm starting to see the value of it. Maybe I'm just selling out.

Or maybe I need my wife to pass along some more pointers on how to get invited to the cool parents parties. I hear some of the really wild don't close down until 8:00 or even 8:30.

Fight Club's Final Engagement

So I have a theory: most men are relationally stupid/handicapped/ridiculous.

Most men, myself included, have minimal inclination towards genuine relating. We'd rather talk about sports, the stock market, our work, cars/boats/hunting...just about anything other than what's actually going on in our own souls.

Of course, this is most often because we have no idea what's going on in our own souls. Which is perhaps not a uniquely male problem. But our inability to communicate much beyond the surface of events and facts makes it perhaps all the more likely that we'll never get to that level of discovery.

And so it was with great reservation that I sent the following invitation last July to a group of guys from church:

So I’m reading Romans 1 and three things seem to mark Paul’s life: prayer, community and mission. And I’m thinking that I could use help in all three areas.

And I’m realizing that I believe deeply in the power and value of community and that I spend much of my life building it for other people but don’t partake of it myself as much as I need to or should.

And I’m thinking that my life would be much richer if I had a group of guys who (to use Sean Jecko’s wonderful image) served as a sort of ‘board of directors’ in my life, to discern wise decisions from foolish ones, to encourage me in my husbanding/fathering at home to my wife and kids as well as to pray for me in the mission God has called me to on campus.

I’m thinking I’d love a group of guys who shared life together a little more deliberately, recklessly, courageously, humbly, boldly. To remind one another about the gospel when we forget it, to encourage and challenge and push and question and learn from one another.

From this invitation, Fight Club was born. It was six of us initially, then five.

Over the course of our year together, nearly all of us had seismic opportunities, challenges, transitions, and/or family issues to deal with. Some of those were once-in-a-lifetime, forks in the road. Some ended well, others not as we would have liked.

Over the course of our year together, we learned to be a community of guys who cared for each other. For some of us, the question, "how is it with your soul?" was a familiar and easy one to engage. For others of us, the question and the accompanying new language it required was difficult at first.

We listened to one another's stories. We received the different gifts we each brought to the table. We shared about our lives each week and we went to battle in prayer for one another. We stuck it out even after a stretch around December where we didn't meet for several weeks and I wondered if Fight Club was over and done with.

It wasn't. The Lord had significant work for us to do together this spring.

And then, it became clear that the season of Fight Club was over. Several guys are leading new small groups this fall or are eager to do a small group Bible study with their wives. Kelly and I are in a new church and needing to really root-in there.

So we closed out last night. Each guy took a turn in the hot seat. The guy in the hot seat shared how God had used Fight Club in his life over the course of the past year.

Then each of us affirmed the guy in the hot seat, told him what we've appreciated about him. Then each of us exhorted the guy in the hot seat--spoke specifically into what it will look like for that guy to follow the Lord, called them to take off sin and press on towards Christ.

The guys were generous with their affirmation and spot-on with their exhortations. When it was my turn in the hot seat, they encouraged me greatly in my gifts and their warnings and exhortations for what it would mean for me to continue toward Christ were spot-on. We knew each other, loved each other and wanted Christ for one another. A marvelous and rare gift of grace.

I've been in a bunch of small groups over the years. Some have been fantastic and others just sort of average. But I don't know if I've ever had a group of guys who were more willing to talk about the deepest, hardest, most raw places of our souls as I've had with this group of guys.

Thank, Fight Club guys. You've been a tremendous gift to me and my family and my work this past year. Most guys go their whole lives without conversations the caliber of which we participated in nearly weekly. I pray for each of you to continue to grow in your love for the Lord and for each of you to find men who will continue to ask "and how is it with your soul?"

And I pray that for each of you, o faithful blog readers, as well...especially for the guys.

Rattlesnake-Anxious, Missing Disney, and The Boogie Blesses Davis

Last night some friends and I escorted our good friend Brian Wilcox to the world's most insane marathon: the boogie.

Given that I'm not anything remotely resembling a runner, I categorically think marathons are insane. But this one takes the cake.

It's in the middle of no where (Ellerbe, NC, anyone?). There's no police blocking traffic. It starts at 6 p.m, gets dark around 9 p.m. and there are no street lights. Temperature is generally over 85-degrees. Last night it was hovering right at 90. The ideal race conditions would probably be right around 40 degrees cooler. The release form warns that there have been sitings of bobcats, polecats, rattlesnakes, and loose dogs.

There were 87 people signed up to run the marathon. Concurrent with the marathon is a 50-mile run, 78 people were signed up to run that last night. I overheard someone say that if you can finish the 50-miler in 12 hours, you're doing well. That's 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. of running.

Apparently there were a few no-shows, proof that not all runners are completely insane.

At the pre-race briefing under the old oak tree outside the church where the boogie is hosted, the race coordinator started by announcing: "This ain't Disney World!" He proceeded to remind runners about all possible hazards (no lights, some cars, only one aid station, six houses total on the course with some roaming dogs). He also informed us that rattlesnakes are not endangered in that county--good to know.

So while I was a couple hours away cheering on my friend Brian and hoping that the rattlesnakes didn't make their way into our card game, Kelly was putting the kids to bed. She graciously blessed this rare opportunity to get away together with some old friends, most of whom do not live locally.

As she was putting Davis to bed, she was explaining that Daddy was away on an adventure with some other daddies. Davis responded, "I hope when I get to be a daddy I can go away on adventures, too!"

This is a significant lesson for my little guy to take home, and my wife delivered it perfectly. I hope that Davis sees that I love God, my wife and my kids recklessly.

But I also want him to see that daddies need friends. So many dads don't. And I'm blessed to have some rich relationships that I pray will bless my son, as well as both my daughters. One of my most frequent prayers for my kids is that they will have friends in Christ at every life stage. They'll need them.

Brian finished the marathon around 11:30. He had hoped for a sub-4 hour time, but the conditions simply wouldn't allow it. As I rolled back home around 2:30 this morning, I was grateful for my wife and kids.

And I'm also grateful for friends who are crazy enough to run the boogie and invite us to come along with him. It was a gift to me...and to my little boy as he figures out what it means to be a daddy himself some day.

Obnoxious Jerks, Gas Chambers, and "Celebrating Diversity" for Real

So most all of us have had someone in our lives who we could have learned something from...only we didn't. This was because either they were obnoxious jerks or we were too insecure or some combination of all of the above.

So the question becomes, how do we relate to one another in such a way that our gifts and strengths are a blessing to one another rather than a hindrance to genuine community?

This is what drives the noble but distorted humanistic "celebrate diversity" mantra. This is good, because it was what we were meant for. This is distorted because given the problem of sin, we can't actually do this apart from Christ.

There is no salvation in one another. We cannot save ourselves, even with one another's help. We cannot ultimately cure what ails us by simply linking arms and trying to celebrate diversity. We have seen over the past one hundred years what happens when people link arms--sometimes it's good, sometimes it's gas chambers.

But this is not an "easy win" in the church either, where we talk about and celebrate gifts and sometimes that "naming" process can leave us feeling like we got the short end of the proverbial gifts stick.

So how does your giftedness bless me the way it was intended to, rather than threaten or intimidate me? A couple of thoughts:

1. We need to learn to wield our gifts and abilities graciously and humbly. It's a fundamental principle of the Land of the Ruins that hurt people hurt other people: parents who were abused as kids will tend to abuse their kids.

So if we're people who have been intimidated or belittled or who feel insecure in relation to other people's gifts, we're going to be tempted to wield our own abilities like a sword, eager to cut others down to size in order to boost ourselves up.

Instead, we must learn to wield our gifts and abilities with humility and gentleness. That starts by finding our identity and security not in those gifts or how we compare with others, but in the absolute words of love and "naming" that our Lord has spoken into our lives.

In Christ, we are sons, daughters, holy, beloved, redeemed, rescued, heirs, citizens of the kingdom of light, loved, saints, ransomed, bought with a price. Those are our names. They have nothing to do with our own abilities and everything to do with what God has done for us in Christ.

2. We need to learn to walk humbly in the presence of others and delight in the fact that the same good Father who has given us gifts has also seen fit to give our brother or sister their gifts.
This again means that our identity must be rooted in those same adjectives/nouns we just listed.

And it means fundamentally that there is no room for comparison/competition when it comes to our gifts and abilities. None. Comparison/competition is always a lose-lose situation. Either we compare and we find ourselves better and so we are proud, or we compare and we find ourselves on the short end and we end up in despair.

We can acknowledge our own and one another's giftedness--we have to do this. But we do so working from a fundamental "operating system" of grace and mercy, rooted in God, not in our own flesh which is fundamentally about comparison and competition.

Next time your feel threatened or insecure about someone around us, or your tempted to beat someone else up with your competencies, it might be good to pause and ask for help from the Lord. It might be good to ask him to remind you that your security and identity lie in something much greater than comparison and competition...and it might just help us to find that true "unity in diversity" thing that we were made for.

Reflections on Getting De-Friended on Facebook

When I was in college, I loved to d.j. dances and house parties. For a people-pleaser like me, it was like crack: you play a song and instantly you know if people love you. Completely neurotic and unhealthy. Ah, the glory days.

This week I got de-friended by someone on Facebook. Almost definitely not the first time, just the first time I noticed as I've been at the same number of friends for a while.

I have no idea who it was. Maybe it was someone who didn't like my take on Tiger. Or someone who got tired of all my shameless self-promotion. Most likely, it's a student who hung out with IV for a while, friended me after a freshmen retreat, then broke up with us along the way.

For a conflict-avoidant people-pleaser like me (healthier than in college, but still working through it), there's some ways that the ease and anonymity of adding friends on Facebook and being broken up with is nice. There's an understanding (at least in some circles) that Facebook is for a vast array of loose acquaintances.

If you get tired of seeing someone's face pop up in your News Feed, you hide them or de-friend them--and they never know about it.

But in the end I wonder if all this is healthy, at least fora conflict-avoidant, people-pleaser like me. The hardest part and the greatest gift of my four and a half years at Carolina has been dealing with a bunch more conflict and criticism than I would like or prefer. Put simply, I've had to grow up.

An anonymous de-friending on Facebook isn't the end of the world. But when my students ask one another out and break up in a Google-chat (which is how I would have rolled if it had been around during my college days), I can't help but wonder about the loss of inter-personal skills and the maturation that comes with having those necessarily hard interactions.

And then you've got all those annoying, think-they-know-it-all bloggers. Good grief, that's a whole different tirade for another day.

All technology has anticipated blessings and un-anticipated curses. I'm grateful for the ability to keep up with so many people who I would have lost track with throughout the years without social networking.

I just need to not allow it to unhealthily prop me up, as I would be tempted to do. Jesus still calls me to wade into conflict, have hard conversations, be okay with not everyone liking me all the time. He gives me a new name and invites that to be enough for me, no matter what else happens. I don't want to replace that great gift with the flimsy-ness of Facebook friends.

In the mean time, if anyone has a holiday party they need a d.j. for, let me know...as long as you're cool with the circa 1988-2005 musical window!

Overcoming the (Male-ish) Curse of Being Job's Friends

There seems to be a universal gene in men to attempt to fix people when they come to us with problems or concerns. Some women also have inherited this unfortunate gene, but with guys it seems to be almost hard-wired.

If you've never read the book of Job before, it's a maddening and gripping piece of Scripture. Calamity strikes Job. His friends show up. They spend most of the book telling him the calamity must all be his fault--he did something to deserve it.

Job refuses that explanation and demands that God answer him. God shows up at the end, doesn't ever answer his question, reminds him that God is God and he is not. Job submits to the mystery of God's sovereignty and his life is restored to an even greater degree of blessing.

But the point for today is this: his friends were idiots. They insisted on trying to fix Job and counsel him when their self-perceived insight and wisdom and advice was completely wrong.

The other day I was with a good friend of mine. He was sharing some challenges in his life. I found myself talking, and talking, and talking some more in response. I was trying to fix stuff. Last year I had students who complained that I too quickly and easily tried to offer them advice rather than really listening to them. I was trying too hard to fix them.

Men, as Larry Crabb contends in his epic book "The Silence of Adam," prefer to live by code rather than courage. Relational uncertainty and mystery causes many men to freeze up, remain silent rather engage. This is why many men pour their energies out at work (clear code, clear wins, we can figure out how to make this work) while neglecting wives and kids (no clear code, uncertainty, mystery, more demanding).

So when someone shares with us problems, we want to fix it. We like to think we can figure out "the code" and offer it to someone else.

But guys (and women who share this tendency) please hear me as I learn this myself--no one likes to be fixed. We are sorely tempted to be like Job's friends and offer stupid advice.

Instead, let us listen, come alongside, and pray (we are way, way too slow to recognize the power of this important gift that we can give to one another). And let us offer words of suggestion, advice, and recommendation only sparingly. They are often not nearly as helpful as we would like to think.

Hitting the Other Extreme

Over the past fourteen years, I've talked with all kinds of people at various extremes. Some folks on one extreme are basically the "forget you, I'm doing whatever I want to with my life" types. Their faith doesn't much come into play when it comes to what they consider their "rights."

Those are the folks who need the passage from Romans 14 that I pulled from yesterday.

But there are other people at the other end of the extreme. They have little to no self-concept and get run over all the time. They enable others to continue to live in unhealthy/sinful patterns by not confronting wrong-doing. They say yes to everyone all the time to make everyone happy...often at great cost to themselves and others around them who love them.

Those people need to hear a different word: love your neighbor as yourself presupposes some healthy degree of self-love. That means healthy boundaries.

A healthy self love is rooted in a genuine humility that understands that we are worthy of being loved because God has created us and bought us back for himself at great cost to himself. That self must be redeemed, healed, cleansed, and transformed, but it is love-able.

The description of the people at either extremes are, of course, caricatures. But my guess is that most of us can, perhaps with a little help from our friends, identify ourselves as leaning towards one end or the other.

Several weeks ago I was talking about the burn-out of my students with an older, wiser man in the ministry. He commented that burn-out is the result of people not truly realizing that they were loved by God.

I responded by telling him that the unfortunate thing about living here in the South is that people already think that they know that...even though most of us remain as ignorant as the rest of the country about this fundamental, critical reality.

My hope is that people on both ends of the extreme might live in the awesome reality of the deep, deep love of God, and have it impact in real life the real people that we interact with on a daily basis. It always results in love, it just looks a little differently, depending on what end of the extreme you happen to find yourself.

Panacea Wary, Meats and Veggies, and Being un-American

I am panacea wary.

Healthcare, organizational growth, the spiritual life. There isn't just one thing that has to happen that makes everything suddenly come into alignment. Growth in any sector, industry, or the spiritual life is a confluence of lots of factors, lots of small and big decisions.

It is a somewhat common cliche in Christian circles to argue that if we just do X (pray more, focus more on Jesus, worship more fully, read more Scripture) then everything else will come "naturally." We'll be more bold in sharing our faith, for example, or love our neighbors more freely or serve more selflessly if we just do this other, more important thing first.

In reading through the book of Romans, apparently Paul was panacea wary as well.

If any one portion of Scripture makes the main thing the main thing, it has to be Romans 8: forgiveness, worship, the final redemption of all things, help in suffering--it's all there, and it's gloriously epic.

But Paul, contrary to those of us who are tempted to think in terms of panaceas, doesn't stop there. He doesn't just say, "well, that's it, and the rest of your Christian life will naturally flow from there." He spends another seven chapters teasing out the specific implications of all that he unpacks in Romans 8.

And what's striking to me this time through Romans is how much ink Paul spills on applying the work of Christ to the life of the community. Paul word here is ruthless to our American individualism and sense of entitlement and "rights."

Bottom line: we have no "rights" apart from the right to submit to Christ and therefore to our neighbor for whom Christ died.

Paul says: One of you eats meat, the other one doesn't because their conscience won't allow it. So if you're with someone who doesn't eat meat--don't eat it. Why would you do something so stupid as to eat meat if it's going to destroy the faith of someone for whom Christ gave his life?

Put in today's language--why would you consume entertainment or drink alcohol, or do anything in the company of someone for whom doing so would cause them to struggle in their faith? Are you not willing to let go of your "rights" in this particular instance in order to honor someone? Did not Christ give up his "rights" in dying for that person?

Giving up our perceived rights is pretty un-American. I don't know if in the U.S. we'll ever have a wide-spread experience of this in the church.

Perhaps, however, a movement in this direction might be the beginnings of revival: the reckless submitting to one another because we start to believe that life in Christ and the loving our neighbor as ourselves truly matters, in real time, in real life, with real decisions.

Not a panacea, just hundreds, maybe thousands, of small and big decisions to live out the reality of God's work in the world with courage and patience and love.

Saving the Whales, Leading a Freaking Bible Study, Finding Time for What Matters

So for the past six or seven weeks on campus, each large group meeting we've been casting vision for what we think a Christ-Centered Community looks like.

We've talked about a community of grace and forgiveness, a community of faith, a community of hope, and a community of love. And last week, after four weeks of positive vision, we talked about what we don't want to be.

And last week I got a chance to speak into a sickness at UNC: the sickness of busy-ness. Student life at UNC presses students to do so much. As an InterVarsity community, we long to go against that grain. We are not going to be too busy for significant relationships.

The problem is that my students got to UNC by being over-achieving, stressed-out high schoolers. Then they come to UNC. And of course, it doesn't get any better because now they're surrounded by 17,000 other over-achieving, stressed-out people.

One startling realization for many freshmen: if you skim the top 12% off of every high school and put them in the same context, not everyone's going to be in the top 12% any more.

This can either bless them with the realization of their limits, or it can drive them to an even greater degree of frenetic activity. Alas, many choose the latter path: pre-med/pharmacy/nursing/business/law, must-have a 3.9 GPA, must save some whales, tutor some kids, keep some sort of social life....and for the Christian kids, add on leading a freaking Bible study to top it all off.

This, of course, is simply a mirror-reflection of our frenetic culture. My students just have more free-time to cram more stuff into their lives because they're not working in one place from 8-6.

But here's the deal: nobody had more significant work to do than Jesus. Nobody. And he made the time and space for significant relationships.

So if the volunteering/Bible study leading/major path/work habits of your life mean that you do not have time for significant relationships, then it is almost guaranteed that you are not doing what God would have you to do. You are over-committed and out of step with the Spirit. If Jesus had time given his responsibilities and the nature of his calling, so must we.

That's not just a word for my students, is it? It's been ringing my own ears for most of the past week...

The Brothel, the Casket, and Labor Day

Labor Day weekend every year comes at just the right time for me. Not only is it a chance to rest after the frenzied pace of the first couple weeks of school, our annual Labor Day tradition reminds me why I do what I do.

Her senior year, my wife Kelly lived in a house of nine women in Chapel Hill/Carrboro. All of these women were involved in InterVarsity as undergrads.

At the end of their year together, they (along with a couple of women who didn't live in the house me and my roommate referred to as "the brothel") committed to reuniting every year on Labor Day.

Fourteen years later, we just returned from Ocean Isle Beach. This weekend's festivities included 29 people--the original women plus husbands plus a fleet of children. Unfortunately, a couple of folks couldn't make it this year.

Most of us were involved with IV at UNC while in college. We have all been together often enough over the years to feel like family. Fourteen years later, all the marriages are still intact. Fourteen years later, all of us are still walking with the Lord.

I have been doing this job long enough to recognize that campus ministries go through seasons--some times things are strong, other times the group doesn't quite gel. We were involved in a particular season of IV at UNC that was extraordinary.

My goal for my students is that they will graduate UNC with life-long soul-caliber friends. Friends who will bring them to Jesus. Friends who will stand with them at their wedding and carry them out in their casket and in between love and encourage and rebuke and speak the gospel to them.

Kelly and I had just such an experience. And this weekend, I was reminded what a tremendous gift it is.

The Love Triangle: You, Jesus, and the Mat

I just got home after our week 2 large group on campus--the first full week of classes, heading into Labor Day and it's been a great start to the year.

Tonight I spoke on what it meant to be a community of faith. And I used the passage from Mark 2, the paralytic on the mat.

To sum up: paralyzed guy gets carried by his friends to see Jesus. They can't get to him because of the crowd where he's teaching, so they climb up to the roof, dig a hole in the ceiling and lower him on his mat in front of Jesus.

I don't think that there's any greater picture of a community faith than this: to be a group of people who are so radically committed to getting on another in front of Jesus that we'll do whatever it takes, even tear holes in roofs, in order to get you there.

But in order to live as a healthy, interdependent community of faith, we have to understand our relationship with the love triangle of you, Jesus, and the mat.

There are three more extreme ways that we can relate to the mat.

1. Some of us don't want anything to do with the mat--we want mat-independence.

We don't want to be needy or broken, so we won't lie on the mat. And we don't want to have to be bothered to help others who are needy or broken, so we won't carry the mat. We've bought the uniquely American myth of the radically independent and autonomous individual.

But to have any part of Jesus means we must deal with the mat. Because the only way we come to him is by lying on it, confessing our need and his sufficiency. And the only way we follow him faithfully is by helping to carry others to him, and taking our turn on the mat when need arises.

The call here is to repent. Independence is a myth, a lie. We are hard-wired for relationship, first with God, then with one another. We must learn healthy inter-dependence. We must learn to relate rightly to Jesus and to the mat.

2. Others of us love the mat, in fact, we're mat-addicted. We love crisis, drama, and all the attention and affection we get when we're lying on the mat. Perhaps it starts as genuine need, but we grow comfortable here, become used to being the center of attention. For some of us, it's the only way we feel loved.

The call here is to hear Jesus words: "take up your mat and walk." Jesus speaks words of healing over us, and calls us to trust him--his love is sufficient for our needs. The call to those who are addicted to being on the mat is to walk in the power and healing of God. That's a process, but it starts by being willing to get up off the mat.

3. But the most common issue here at UNC: those willing to CARRY the mat for others but who are unwilling to LAY on the mat themselves. These folks are willing to serve, but hate not having it all together, hate being needy or broken or vulnerable.

And we can make it sound so spiritual: I don't want to impose. I don't want to be a bother. I don't want to sound like a whiner.

But the reality is that the reason we won't lie on the mat, even when we need to is one word: pride. That's not selfless or spiritual at all. It's just death. And the call here is to repent of that pride and to die to our desire to be seen as strong or powerful or polished and to engage in real relating with the people around us, Jesus, and the mat.

There's a time for all of us to carry the mat for others and a time to lie on the mat ourselves. That's genuine, real, healthy, interdependent Christ-centered community.

Paul and Jesus meets Scrapple and the Guys

So I'm reading in Romans and one thing that strikes me is how much Paul quotes the Old Testament. What he's arguing is that what God has done in Jesus is surprising, but it's not out of line with his intent from the beginning.

In other words, there's some dis-continuity in what's happened with Jesus--it's not exactly what was expected--but there's also a strong degree of continuity: what God was about in calling Abraham and through the hopes of Isaiah and the Psalms and others, he has accomplished supremely in Christ.

So Paul's understanding of the present situation and his vision for the future is rooted in the history of God and his working with his people.

As I'm thinking about what it means for our group of guys to have vision for our lives, our careers, our families and our souls for the next ten years, I've come to the conclusion that any vision needs to be rooted firmly in our own histories and be in step with how we have already met Jesus along the way.

We have to know and begin to perceive God's work in our stories to this point if we have any hope of leaning into a God-ordained vision for our futures.

So here's how we're going to proceed for the next couple of months. I'm posting this in the hopes that it might help some of you think about your own community/relational context and that it might spark application in your relationships.

Four Stages:

1. Each of us draws up our own segmented life-line. This is from Bobby Clinton's book "The Making of a Leader."

The line is segmented at a boundary marker: going to college, getting married, a move, a birth, a death, a job change--any significant shift in your life that marks the end of one season and the beginning of another.

In between each of those markers, you list the significant 'process items' that happened during that season: people, roles or jobs, communities you were a part of, Scriptures that were important, crisis that happened, etc. When it's done, this should be a rough-sketch of the major movements, players, moments, moods, communities and roles in your life.

Each of us will share our lifelines. The goal here is to start to see patterns: what kinds of opportunities seem to come your way? What passions or gifts seem to emerge? What kinds of sins seem to regularly trip you up? Where are the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit?

2. I've come up with a list of questions for 5 main categories that we've all agreed are the major ones: relationship with God, family, work, self, and "scrapple."

Scrapple is a meal that's made up of whatever's leftover in the fridge. So scrapple is the other stuff of life that doesn't fit those categories--a hobby, for instance, or something that you've always sort of thought about or dreamed about but don't ever think it could happen.

In all five of these categories, one of the last questions is: How is it with your soul right now, during this season of your life, in this area of your life?

3. From there, we'll start to talk about vision for the future. Given what God has done and where you are now, what is your picture of your preferred future in each of these categories?

4. Once we've got some vision-stories in place, some images and words and ideas, we'll start to talk about strategies and tactics. What concrete steps do we need to take to get to that place of vision in our family, in our work, in our relationship with God, etc?

My hope is that we might be done by Christmas. This process, completed thoughtfully and prayerfully, would be a pretty cool Christmas present for ourselves...and (I hope) for the women who are stuck with us!

Real Men's Community: What Gets Proverbial Butts in Gear

So we talked last week about men's community--how dysfunctional we tend to be, and what it might look like to live beyond the crisis of the week.

This week, I have some fresh rants for the guys to think about (and you know who you are), along with those of you who care about us guys.

So when guys do get around to getting together in some sort of intentional, regular gathering for spiritual/real life conversations, there seems to be one of two roads it goes down.

The first is the check-in. This group is laid back, over coffee or breakfast or lunch. This is a great place for men to start. Most of us are pretty inept at talking about stuff like marriage or parenting or our spiritual lives, so this (again, especially for college guys) is a really helpful place to begin.

The second road in evangelical spirituality is a little more aggressive: it's the 'accountability group.' This is a group of guys who are regularly checking in on a pre-agreed-upon list of areas in their lives where there is an ongoing struggle to resist sin or an area where apathy has set in and there's a desire to get the proverbial rear in motion.

The problem with this meeting, as good as it is to be honest about where we need help, is that it's not actually helping to solve the problems that many of us guys have. Let me explain--and here I'm borrowing heavily (aka flat-out stealing) from my favorite ministry-type book that I've read in the past five years, How People Grow.

We learn internal disciplines/boundaries/motivations starting externally--from our parents in childhood. As kids, our parents are supposed to set regular, good, healhty limits on us. Those limits over time become internalized and if all goes well, we grow up to be healthy adults with a reasonable amount of self-control/motivation--mitigated, of course, by our own innate wiring (the "nature" part).

Of course, all doesn't always go well. And so sometimes, often in fact, we need a fresh run at someone helping us with boundaries from the outside in order that we might learn them internally in a particular area of our lives.

But the weekly accountability group doesn't do this as well as it might. Because all it is in many cases is just a fresh recitation of the law: did you or did you not measure up this week to these standards?

And if someone fails, we pat them on the head and tell them to do better next week. But if they could do better on their own next week, they wouldn't need the accountability group. The point is, they need more help than just a weekly check-in because they don't have the internalized discipline to do better on their own. That's why they're struggling.

What we need is community. Real-time, real-life, "I'm struggling today, can you remind me that I do/don't want to do this" conversations that overflow from the island of just a meeting into every day life.

What we need is guys who we can call on the way home from work when we're spent who can help us to remember that loving our kids matters. What we need is guys we can call when we're struggling, right then, right at that moment, who can talk us down off the ledge, call us to purity, to grace, to love, to life.

What we need is Christ-centered-community-in-real-time. Real relationships that really intersect our lives at the points of struggle, apathy, joylessness, and even and especially celebration.

Alas, that so few of us have it.

Living Beyond the Crisis of the Week

So on Tuesday night, I gathered a handful of guys together to talk about what a guys group might look like. As I was thinking more about how to cast vision for the group, I thought about my impression of what most men's groups are about.

Most men's groups seem to spend most of their time talking about issues on the micro level: my marriage/dating relationship this week, my struggles with porn this week, my complaint about work/school/my fantasy football team this week.

This is all well and good. And particularly for college guys, I think this kind of honesty and accountability is crucial to healthy development of a fuller understanding of authentic community.

But the guys that were meeting on Tuesday night were all 29-37, all married, most of us with young kids. In our stage of life there's more that we can and need to deal with than just the micro-issue/crisis of this week.

We're at a point in our lives where we have enough life experience and understanding of ourselves and our marriages and our work and our kids that we need to start thinking on the macro level.

What kind of family culture do we want to create? What kind of relationships do we want to have with our kids when they get to be adults? What kind of marriages do we want to have 15 years from now when the last kid goes off to college? What passions and gifts have we uncovered in our work? How might those passions and gifts be better used and enjoyed?

No one is pressing us to ask these questions. They are the important but not urgent questions that easily get crushed by the crisis-of-the-week that often drives our lives.

But living by the crisis of the week is a terrible way to live. It's too small, too narrow. And we wake up at some point ten years later, twenty years later, and realize that we spent our whole lives just surviving and never really living.

And a men's group that simply helped us through the crisis of the week would be nice but not particularly compelling. If we have no vision for where we want to go, how do we know if our lives week to week are in or out of alignment?

Checking in on the micro of each week without a big picture of where I hope to go is like making sure I'm following the rules of the road without any of us having any clue where I'm going. Does that make any sense?

A micro-level weekly check in to make sure that I'm still on the treadmill isn't getting me anywhere. Spending dedicated time kicking around life goals and dreams and having some men help me take weekly, monthly, yearly steps to get there--that's worth meeting once a week for.

The guys were in. So now we've just gotta' do the easy stuff--you know, set a few whole life goals, gather up our entire lives in a couple quick and pithy vision statements. We should be able to knock that out in just a couple hours. I'll let you know what we decide to tackle after that.

Men, Relational-Inept-ness, and the Anti-Vapid Question

Every so often over the past fourteen years of doing campus ministry I step back and realize that I'm expending a great deal of energy creating community for my students while I am participating in very little for myself.

The apostle Paul's life was marked by prayer, community and mission. Restoring right relationships was central to all that he did and all that he taught. My own life is too sparsely marked by community to have the quality and depth that I long for and that I was created for.

This dirth of real community is a reality for most of us. But I think that men are particularly inept at it. Women have their own challenges with community, but us guys seldom get to the point where we have the depth of relationships to get into the type of trouble that women can tend to get into. And as a man, I include myself with this sorry lot.

Men generally don't know how to engage at the places and depths where it matters: are you loving your wife? are you loving your kids? are you loving Jesus right now? how is it with your soul?

Work and fantasy football and golf/fishing/video game/whatever conversations all have a place within this larger context of more genuine engagement. When it's only about work, fantasy football, and golf, then it's vapid; "how is it with your soul" is the anti-vapid question.

On the other extreme, attempts at making relationships perpetually super-intense/spiritual/emotional/deep come up empty and hollow--most of us cannot live at the deep end of the ocean all the time.

So this week I'm taking a shot at gathering some men together for some sort of regular, committed-to-each-other community. My hope is that we might be able to forge soul-level friendships. My hope is that the question "how is it with your soul" might be met here not with blank stares but with welcome, thoughtful, honesty.

A friend once shared about the dream of having a "board of directors," a group of men who help to make and process life decisions like job changes and navigating family challenges. It would be glorious if we knew and trusted one another well enough to have this type of commitment to one another.

But all of this is pipe dreams right now. We'll see what happens on Tuesday night as we meet and begin to talk about what God might do in us together. I'm hoping we might take some good first steps--honesty with each other, and the space to encourage one another towards the Lord, towards our wives and kids, and towards the mission God has called each of us to be a part of.

And if that doesn't work out, I've got my fantasy football draft in a couple of weeks. Maybe the guys could help me to decide what to do with my first-round pick.

Dating, Parenting, and Giving Permission

The thing about working with students for thirteen years is that I've seen a lot of dating relationships. I've seen some tremendously healthy dating relationships and some tremendously un-healthy dating relationships.

In thirteen years one pattern I've noticed is this: no one who's in an unhealthy dating relationship actually thinks that they're in an unhealthy dating relationship.

We have a tremendous capacity to self-deceive. This is why community is so critical to being healthy human beings. Everyone needs at least one person who has the permission to call you out on anything.

In my humble opinion, I'm a pretty good dad. I love my kids fiercely. But I know that my parenting isn't perfect. Ergo, my wife has permission to speak into/call me out in my parenting. If she doesn't, who will?

I want to love and parent my kids as best I can. This means being open to correction. Preservation of my fragile little ego is not what matters. Parenting my kids well is what matters. Them growing up with a father who reflects the perfect love of the true Father as best he can is what matters.

I've got other people, guys, in my life who have the same permission: Daniel, Sam, Marshall, Tripp, Brian. This can't be all on my wife. She's got to put up with me plenty. I need guys who will also love me enough to speak into my life when they see unhealthy patterns.

The truth is that we are great at rationalizing and self-justifying. The truth is that other people often see us and know us better than we see and know ourselves.

The truth is that to live a fully-real life, we need people who have permission to speak into our lives, even at the most intimate and vulnerable levels. If we refuse to have this, we are condemned to living a life that is susceptible to being a lie.

Year-End Reflections: Toxins, Inebriation, & Calling Cali

Today is my students' last day of exams. This day generally calls for overly-inebriated celebration by the students and a more reflective celebration by me.

Clearly, my four month sabbatical and the events leading up to that time were the most significant parts of the school year.

But the six weeks back have been really good for me to continue to work out the good soul-work that I did while I sat in Panera for three hours a day for four months with my Bible, journal, Ipod and the occasional book.

The most significant difference in me on campus coming off my sabbatical is my eagerness to keep short accounts on things toxic in my soul.

One afternoon I found myself driving home with tons of doubt, discouragement, and frustration rolling around in my head. Rather than simply trying to talk myself down off the ledge as I would normally do, I realized I needed help.

I called my brother out in Cali, told him what had happened that day, asked him to pray for me. He did, right there on the phone. And as he prayed truth over me I felt the angst wash away. It was a prayer of cleansing that I needed before I got home.

Rather than bury the toxins only for them to come back and bite me another day, I was washed clean of them. I have found myself doing this lots over the past six weeks: calling friends, asking them to pray over me as I've found my thoughts or my heart in places that were not healthy or holy.

Summer time will be a nice return to the sabbatical rhythms of being home with the family more at nights and extra time and space for study and reflection.

But I hope that I might maintain this commitment to releasing the crud through the generous love of the people in my life rather than playing through it. It's way healthier...and I don't get another sabbatical for seven more years.

Inheritance Greater than Rice-A-Roni

Yesterday afternoon I managed to pry myself away from college basketball for a couple of hours to lead our small group Bible study. I'm glad I did.

We dug into Ephesians 1:15-23. And there was one particular phrase that really caught my attention and (since I lead the thing) that I made our small group deal with:

[I pray that] that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints...

What I want that last line to say is "inheritance for the saints." But it doesn't say that. It says "inheritance in the saints." All about those stinkin' prepositions again. A couple of takes on this.

First, part of God's inheritance at the end of all things is his people. God has created all people and longs for all people to be his inheritance. But the reality is that not all will come to the party he is throwing. For those who do respond, we are richly treasured, glorious, objects of joy and delight. That starts today. God delights to have you for his inheritance today. Really. Soak in that for a second.

Secondly, God's people are a significantly rich part of our inheritance for one another. This section of Paul's prayer is listing the things available to the believer, the gifts that God longs to give us. Not only are we God's inheritance, we are the inheritance for one another, given to each other as part of our eternal joy and gladness.

If we move beyond the theory and to the practical, and if we're honest, many of us would find this disappointing. Most of us would prefer to self-select, to have our circle of friends from our church or our flavor of "the church" and not have to be associated with the rest. There are lots of annoying Christians out there, no matter how you slice it.

And so this sounds more like the consolation prize on Jeopardy then the real winner's take-home: a year supply of Rice-A-Roni while someone else got the jackpot. I want something better than to have to be stuck with this sorry lot called "the church" with all its embarrassments throughout the centuries.

But God, in his infinite creativity and with every possible resource at his disposal, has seen fit to so design our great inheritance with one another smack in the middle of it. If you are in Christ today with me, then you and I are given to one another right now and will be finally and eternally given to one another forever.

For those for whom this feels particularly repulsive, the good news is that this final giving will be as finished and fully redeemed people. But this has some immense ramifications for how we live life here and now.

If you are my inheritance, for example, I better care of you. Slandering you or gossiping about you, lying to you or using you for my own gain, despising you for either your weaknesses (to make myself feel good) or your gifts (which make me feel bad), all of these are out of order. You are my inheritance. It's time to treat you as such.

And "the church" that is so easy to hate on, those are your peeps, your eternal inheritance. Might be time to make peace with that now.

Going Amish on Community for Krispy Kremes

I read an article yesterday in Christianity Today that was talking about depression in the U.S. One side-bar made mention of a study that found Amish communities have a markedly lower rate of depression than the rest of the U.S.

Commentators on this study see it as indicative of how stable their communal ties are. Community combats depression.

A couple of years ago I was doing some reading about small group communities. One book cited a study where they tracked two different cohorts of people: one that was fastidious about their diet and another whose primary trait was a vast and stable social network. The social ones out-lived their fruit-and-vegetable-eating counterparts.

A number of years ago I was talking with a distant cousin about her recently retired widower father. She'd done some research on retirees and the single most significant factor that indicated longevity of life post-retirement was community. She felt quite confident that her dad, with a lifetime of significant relationships in his small town, was going to be fine.

Of course most all of this research can be explained physiologically and psychologically. But given the fact that I believe a Relationship is at the center and the source of the universe, I think that there's some serious image-bearing-ness happening here.

So sell the car, de-wire the house, buy yourself a horse and buggy, and do whatever else it might take to get yourself into real community. The obstacles (internal, circumstantial, schedule-wise, and all the rest) are often great, sometimes they feel overwhelming. I know they often feel that way to me.

But the consequences of living a fragmented, isolated, dis-located life are too costly to ignore. And besides, I figure for every handful of real relationships I have, it roughly equals a couple Krispy Kreme doughnuts per week. That's some serious pay-off.

Mucking Around in Community

I've had a couple of conversations over the past several weeks about small group Bible studies.

For those of you who aren't dwelling in Christian sub-culture land, small group Bible studies basically are groups of 5-15 people who often meet in houses for Bible study, prayer, encouragement, etc. These are usually organized by churches for the purpose of helping people get to know one another and mature in their faith.

One question that swirls around small groups is style. Are these supposed to be studies, with an emphasis on information? Or are these supposed to be more about building relationships?

I don't think that these two are mutually exclusive. But for my money, if I have to choose between a small group leader who will teach a theology class each week or a leader who knows how to build trust and community, I'll take the community person every day of the week.

On Sunday afternoons in the small group that I lead, I'm all about opening up the Bible together and mucking around in it together. I could do a more heady study, but why? The problem that most people have in my circles is not that they don't know enough. The problem is that none of us actually lives responsive-ly and responsibly to the stuff we already know.

That's where community comes in. All of our lives we are shaped and formed by relationships, for better or for worse: family of origin, who you hung out with in high school, what you did in college, marriage and kids. This is how God designed us.

My goal in small group is for lives to be changed, not for people simply to know more stuff. There's a baseline amount of understanding that needs to happen, but real-life, real-time gospel application happens only in the context of a community that helps us to understand: "what the crap does this actually mean for me Monday in cube world or in the classroom or parenting my kids or trying to be married to this imperfect person sitting beside me?"

If you're reading this thing and you're at all interested in discovering real faith, real Christianity that goes beyond ritual or a sub-culture or a social circle or a country club, please find a church that helps you find real community.

If you don't have anyone that you can talk to that will help you to figure out how Jesus speaks into your life when your marriage stinks or you want to drop out of school and join the circus or when you lose your job or when your kids are driving you towards infanticide, then you haven't really begun to live yet.