I’ve changed my address, don’t forward the mail!

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!” – Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

There is nothing quite like a fresh start.

A new job, a new grade, a new relationship. Doesn’t matter what it is, there is such potential there for it to be something good. It’s like going to bed at the end of a horrible day only to wake fresh the next morning. Sometimes like with Dorothy and her tornado, a fresh start comes in a whirlwind of destruction. Other times it just comes with the sun slipping quietly up over the horizon.

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” – John Wayne

The start of a new Revolution

As someone who has worked with young people for more than 20 years now, I’ve had the opportunity to see the world through many sets of eyes.  I’ve seen what excites them, what stirs their emotion, and what can cause them to sit back and simply be amazed.  The one constant emotion that I have seen pop up over the years is anger.  Anger at the people and situations that bring suffering to others in the world.  But what do they do with that anger?  What can they do when the problem seems bigger than them, and an impossible one to take on?  Unfortunately, many times nothing happens and they let the motivation fizzle out before great change has taken place.

Then there is this generation that has been emerging for the last few years.  They’ve heard the mantra of change, but have seen very little of it come from the people in power.  Just like a young David from the story in 1 Samuel 17, they have arrived on the scene at a time of inactivity and stalemate caused by the fear of giants – things like political correctness, greed, and fear of offending have immobilized the generation that has gone before them.  But these that are coming in, they can not sit idly by letting their courage become atrophied like that of those who are there but do nothing, for they know that there is STILL a battle to fight.

Glimpses of the Cross

My wife and I pastored our own church for 6 years.  It was a wonderful experience, full of many unforgettable memories – many of which surrounded holidays or special services we held.  One of my favorite times was an Easter service we did one year at the local movie theater.  I didn’t like just doing the “normal” things churches do for holidays and wanted to reach out to people who might never come to the church itself, not even at Easter.  This was when the movie “The Passion” had just come out, so we rented the largest theater at our local AMC Theater and on Easter Sunday morning opened it up for free to whomever wanted to come. Our worship team brought all their instruments and we sang before the movie started. After the movie I summed up the Gospel message and invited people to respond.  Many lives were touched that morning, and I’m so glad we decided to step out of the norm.

One of the simpler things we did for Easter which became something our church really loved, is what I am about to share with you.  We didn’t have the congregation size, building, or finances to put on some elaborate production… so I pulled together a telling of the Easter story from Peter’s perspective, using readings from Max Lucado and Dawson McAllister along with a mixture of video clips and live songs our worship team sung.  It was simple, but powerful… and it had just as strong an impact as seeing “The Passion” did on the big screen.  I’ve updated it a bit since then.  Enjoy.

Seeing God in “The Hunger Games”

I think that the first I’d heard of The Hunger Games was in a FaceBook conversation between a high school teacher I know and some of her students.  I love to read and have a heart for teens, so when I heard an outline of the story I knew I had to read it for myself.  Of course, then I found out it isn’t just one book but three, and I was thrilled.  There is nothing like a continuing story to wet the appetite of an avid reader.  I remember years ago discovering a paperback book series about the Oregon Trail that numbered into 30 or 40 books… I think I bought the whole set at a used book store in town and I devoured a book every couple of days.  Needless to say, if The Hunger Games story went on beyond the three books, I’d be one happy camper. So, when I found out that the books were being turned into movies as well, I got about as excited as any other fan of the series.

If you’re not familiar with the book, here is the story in a nutshell.  It is written from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old girl named Katniss Everdeen who lives in one of the 13 “districts” in the country of Panem, which is what is left of North America after some future war.  Everything is run by the Capitol, a highly advanced city that seems to hold complete power over the rest of the nation.  The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 to 18 are selected through a lottery system from each of the districts  to compete in a televised battle in which only one person can survive.  The citizens of the Capitol find the most perverse pleasure in following what happens to the contestants from the comfort of their over-indulgent lives, and seem to love hearing the Gamekeeper’s creepy mantra, “Happy Hunger Games!  And may the odds ever be in your favor.”  Think of it as “The Truman Show” meets “Survivor” meets “Lord of the Flies” – or the extreme end result of our cultural fascination with reality television.  The story has families ripped apart, sacrifices being made, a disgust for the disconnected masses of the cultural elite, and a love story or two woven in between.

When God says, “So?”

We have friends who recently moved to Seattle all the way from Spartanburg, South Carolina simply because it was something they wanted to do.  Yes, they prayed about it – they were even considering a couple of other places, one being “back home” to the Tampa Bay area – but in the end, Seattle seemed like the right place to go.  Now that they’ve been there for several months, they are planning on moving to Los Angeles for at least a year to get involved with a large inner-city ministry there called The Dream Center and then see what God has for them next.  We have other friends we’ve been praying with, who have decided to leave a city they’ve been pastoring in for several years, and move “back home” to help strengthen the church they were raised up in almost thirty years ago.  When I was talking with them the other day to see what their decision was, they had told me they hadn’t heard what we would call a “God said”, but how it seemed like the right thing to do.  But is it?

Going the distance.

It all started a few months back with a conversation with a friend at church.  He’d said that he’d never seen the “Lord of the Rings” movies, didn’t plan on seeing them, and really had no desire to see them.  But I just knew that he’d appreciate the story if he would just take the time to watch even the first of the three movies.  Now, this friend is newly married, and I know that his wife appreciates a good story – and she likes LOTR.  So I convinced her to ask him as one of her Christmas presents, for them to come to our house and have dinner and watch the first of the movies (“Fellowship of the Ring”) with us.  He relented.  What else could he do, right?

Well, it’s taken a few months and having to re-do our plans at least once, but last night they arrived at 5:30pm with pizza in hand.  My job was to pick up some orders of chips and queso from Chili’s on the way home – oh, and a large half-Coke-half-diet Coke for my wife.  As I was leaving work around 4:50pm I called and asked if she could have our youngest son look for the movie in our collection so that if it wasn’t there I could pick it up somewhere on the way.  Response back was that he was sure that it was on NetFlix so we had no worries.

Made it to Chili’s, picked up the order, and headed home – would be there by 5:20pm (early, which is amazing).  I was literally five blocks from our street when I get a text from another of our sons: “Dad, I’m at so-and-so’s, can you pick me up so I won’t miss dinner?”  I had just passed that friends house on my way from work to Chili’s – why couldn’t that text have come 15 minutes ago?  Back into the heart of rush-hour traffic to get him, and then finally get back home 15 minutes late for our friends arrival.  Thankfully my wife was already home.

A pocket full of change.

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens…” – Ecclesiastes 3:1

In the first 13 years of my life my family lived in 6 states – one of them twice!  I was born in Alabama, but within a few months we moved to Massachusetts (where generations of my family are), then to Rhode Island, Iowa, New York, back to Massachusetts, and then finally to Florida.  No, we aren’t gypsies.  My dad’s job as a business management engineer involved contracts which lasted just 2-3 years at a time, and at the end of those contracts we picked up and moved to wherever the next one was.  Personally, I loved it.  I loved traveling to new places, making new friends, living in a new house every few years.  I guess you could say, even early on in my life I started to accumulate a pocket full of change.

Ascend.

I have this crazy dream.  It’s not the normal thing that a guy who has lived most of his life in Florida would probably want to do, but I want to do it anyway.  I want to go on a cattle drive.  You know – riding like a cowboy on a horse, yelping and making noises as I try to get cattle moving in the right direction.  Boots, the hat, the whole thing.  Now, I did the “City Slickers” thing and told myself I would have it done before my 40th birthday – well I’m 41 now and I haven’t done it yet.  Funny thing how money is always involved.  But it’s still inside of me rumbling around wanting to be done – and I just KNOW that someday I am going to do it.  I guess this probably leaves you wondering why any sane person would want to do something so unusual, right?  That’s an easy-enough answer… It’s God’s fault.

If you’ve been reading these posts, by now you know I love history… and maybe you’ve also picked up a bit on that part of me that yearns for the big, sweeping, and epic moments of life.  I love movies like “Dances With Wolves”, “Glory” and “The Patriot” – anything full of big, wide, panoramic shots of the openness of America, all packed in with historical moments and zipped up in an overwhelming sound score.  Something in me craves to know that there is more out there than the laid out streets of our neighborhoods.  When I was a child, I had a subscription to Arizona Highways magazine – just so I could look at the pictures of the Grand Canyon and life “out West”.  I would also play for hours alone in the woods near where we lived with an old WWII-era training rifle, letting the hills and streams of Delmar, NY and Walpole, MA become the battlefields of Bunker Hill and Normandy.  Fallen logs would turn into the walls and ramparts at the Alamo or the fences surrounding Gettysburg.  I don’t think that there was a major battle in our nation’s history that I didn’t fight in.  I covered a lot of ground for a kid in the 4th grade.

No reserves. No retreats. No regrets.

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations.” – Isaiah 42:1

It was the summer before my Junior year in High School that God used this verse to confirm that He was calling me into a life in the ministry.  When I responded to the Holy Spirit’s drawing at a youth camp that summer, I knew from that moment forward that I would be working with youth the rest of my life.  I had been praying and asked God to confirm that calling to me through His Word, and one day that scripture “address” popped into my head, and when I looked it up – well, you can see why I would take that as a confirmation.

Over the 25+ years as youth pastors and pastors since then, we have had so many young people come and go through our lives.  It’s been an awesome privilege to see so many grow in their walks with the Lord, and especially in seeing those who have responded themselves to that same call into ministry.  Now – don’t get me wrong, those who are now studying law, or who are teachers, soldiers, store clerks, nurses, firefighters, moms, dads… I am equally proud of each of them, too!  But to deny that there is not some sort of kindredness with those called into ministry would be a lie.  I guess you could compare it to being a Marine and knowing other Marines… sure you admire the Navy, Army, and Air Force – but you really feel connected to another Marine.  I hope that makes sense.

Gaining a fire through the Forge…

I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s this year pretty much in bed.  I woke up two days after Christmas with a bad bug and spent the next few days either in bed sleeping or in the bathroom being sick.  The first time I can ever remember being sick like that was when I was in the third or fourth grade and we lived in New York.  I just remember being so sick that I could barely get out of bed.  Three decades later and I can still remember how uncomfortable it was, and the delirium and strange dreams that always accompany these kinds of sicknesses.  It seems like those dreams are the strangest when you lay there watching television, so this latest time I at least made sure it didn’t come on until the intensity of the bug had passed.  Either way, it felt like an almost prophetic way to end 2011.

“I am sick, discontented, and out of humor. Poor food, hard lodging, cold weather, fatigue, nasty clothes, nasty cookery, vomit half my time, smoked out my senses – the Devil’s in it; I can’t Endure it.  Why are we sent here to starve and freeze?  What sweet felicities have I left at home: a charming wife, pretty children, good beds, good food, good cookery – all agreeable, all harmonious. Here all confusion, smoke and cold, hunger and filthiness…” – Surgeon Albigence Waldo, Valley Forge, December 14, 1777