Great Question

Casa Bonita

Jacqueline's Mariachi birthday serenade

When we asked Jacqueline what she wanted to do to celebrate her 14th birthday there was not even a second's hesitation: I want to take my friends to Casa Bonita!  For those who've never had the C.B. experience, the only way I can describe it is Mexican food Disneyland style (including the corny entertainment).  It's a humongous place (they can seat 900 people at one time) built to resemble a Mexican village - with a working waterfall, shops, video arcades etc.  Basically a perfect place for kids to get lost for hours at a time.  Jacqueline invited three of her friends to come, and the four of them were better entertainment than anything up on stage.  It's a Mexican restaurant, so all four of them ordered chicken fried steak and root beer (??).  They barely ate two bites before they dashed off to the restroom for the first of four or five visits to that magical place.  Can you imagine if they were boys?  "Hey, let's go to the bathroom together!"  Somebody would end up getting punched in the face.  They reappeared briefly, ate a few more bites, then they were off for the next hour and a half having the time of their lives.  The evening cost me a packet, but the memories made were worth every penny.

That caught me off guard

 I went skiing with my friend Scott on Monday, along with two other men who were on ski patrol duty with him that day.  One of them is a fairly new Christian who came to faith a few years ago when his wife suffered a massive stroke after undergoing heart surgery.  God had strategically placed strong Christians around them who responded with compassion, love and support and literally wooed them into the faith.  What a great story!  How I wish we Christians could always lean so appropriately into others' pain, rather than leaning away out of our own fears and insecurities.  Anyway, as we're driving towards Copper Mountain this guy (who's name also happens to be Scott) asks if we would be willing to engage in a short spiritual exercise. We'd just been discussing the state of the economy and how to use investment funds without incurring early withdrawal penalties, so his question caught me a little off guard.  Plus it's not the kind of question you expect to hear in a group of guys, so my curiosity was definitely piqued.  We all agreed, so he asked this question: "Why do you delight in the Lord?"  Hmmm.  There's food for thought. The other guy in the back seat gave a quick answer that showed he hadn't understood the question - but Scott graciously came to his rescue by translating his answer in such a way that he sounded like a genius.  What a classy guy.  We went around the car with our answers, and here's what I said:  the longer I know the Lord, the more aware I am of my own sinfulness, and the more dumbfounded I am by His grace towards me every day.  Why He uses me at all I'll never know, but His warmth and acceptance towards me causes me to feel the same compassion and grace towards other sinners like myself.  It was a deeply spiritual moment shared by four men on their way to go skiing.  What a great question.

Coincidence, or did God have a message...?

I returned last Sunday after speaking four times for the Global Impact Celebration at The Family Church in Gainesville, Florida.   You can listen to my Saturday evening message by clicking on the following link, then choose "GIC Life Commitment Service": http://thefamilychurch.net/media/sermons.php

Here's the interesting thing about last weekend:  I spoke three times - Saturday evening and twice on Sunday morning.  They chose to put my message from Saturday evening on the website, which is interesting to me in light of what happened the next day.  I woke up around 3 a.m. on Sunday morning (which isn't unusual in and of itself) and felt a strong prompting from the Lord to change a few things in my message.  Namely, I cut out a video that was shown just before I spoke the night before, which effectively changed my entire introduction and closing.  I also changed more than one thing in the body of the message.  I don't recommend this practice to visiting preachers, knowing that the church bulletin was already printed with the notes for my message, and the Power Point presentation was also prepared to project the main points of my talk up on the screen as I spoke.  The combined attendance for all three services was around 1500 people, and the largest service is the second one on Sunday morning - so I was taking a big risk to look the fool that morning, and to make my friend Jeff (the Missions Pastor who'd invited me to come) look bad for inviting me.  But at some point in this Walk of Faith we have to be willing to look foolish if we're really serious about following the leading of God's Spirit, right?  It's one thing for me to look stupid on my own, but a whole other level of potential catastrophe if my actions will have a direct impact on someone several other people.  It's a great way to ensure that you're never invited back to speak again!  I have to admit, though, that I felt a strange sense of peace as I got up to speak at the first service that morning. 

I started by explaining that I'd experienced a "Holy Spirit Adjustment" that morning in what I had been prepared to say, and apologized for the fact that the notes in the bulletin and on the screen would be all but useless.  I can only imagine what my friend and the Senior Pastor were thinking at that moment: "Oh Lord, where is he going with this?".  The theme of my message was "Crises of Faith" and how God will use them to shake us up, change our direction, or re-align our thinking with His.  What I changed that morning was to start my sermon by being vulnerable with the church about my own experience with burn-out 3 years ago, and how God used that crisis of faith in our lives to redirect us to leave the mission field and return to the U.S.  Remember: this was the culmination of their missions emphasis week, and the whole thing was to end with the Life Commitment Service that I was now leading - and here I am talking about how God ended my career as a missionary.  Wow, this was going from bad to worse!  Much to my surprise, however, the response from the church was huge: One young African man came forward to accept Christ, five people committed their lives to full-time Christian ministry, and over 150 came forward to make a commitment to going on a short-term missions project or to serve in some other capacity.  Unbelievable. 

After I returned home I received an email from a young woman I'd met after church that day.  The title of her email was "Coincidence, or did God have a message..?"  She explained how she'd had a experience with God that morning, and as I read her email I realized that her experience was due in large part to the changes I'd made to my message (Go God).  She and her boyfriend had broken up several months before when she wanted to get serious about the Lord, and he'd freaked out.  Unbeknownst to her, he showed up that morning and was the one who came forward at the end of the service to put his trust in Christ.  Not only was she shocked by his step of faith, but so much of my message seemed to speak so directly to their specific situation that several of her friends commented on it afterwards.  Although she's still trying to understand the meaning of these events, she was deeply impacted by her "close encounter" with God that morning.  Her story was a reminder to me that all God asks of me is my obedience, and the rest of the story is up to Him. 

I'm diving in.

Self-fulfilling prayers

I am in Gainesville, Florida this week to speak at the Family Church missions conference.  I was able to take a quick road trip down to Orlando on Thursday to spend some time with my folks and a few dear friends.  I have found over time that, besides my family, there are friendships that I will take the time and make the expense to maintain because they fill me up rather than drain me.  And I would have to say that our lives are rich in this respect because in every place we've lived God has added to this ever-growing circle of "fillers".   Relationships are kind of like my pickup truck - it runs pretty well most of the time, but without doing some routine maintenance it would sooner or later start to break down.  So my road trip down to Orlando gave me the opportunity for a relational "tune-up" with my folks and a few special friends.  Now that my folks are moving to Birmingham, Alabama, I won't have a convenient reason to travel to Orlando, so it was important to seize the opportunity afforded by the proximity of Gainesville.

  On the way there and back I listened to several sermons by Andy Stanley, who is one of my favorite communicators when it comes to speaking to those who are new to the faith or who are still "kicking the tires" of Christianity.  He said something that I had never really thought of before (at least not from this perspective) :  you can tell a lot about the spiritual maturity and depth of faith of a church by the kind of prayers that we pray.  According to Andy (and I don't disagree with him), most of our prayers as American Christians tend to be self-fulfilling in nature.  What I mean is that our prayers require no special intervention of a supernatural God to come true.  For example, before we take off to drive from A to B we'll stop to ask God for travel safety.  Well, if we drive the speed limit and our car is well maintained, in all likelihood we will arrive just fine.  Did God answer our prayer?  It's hard to say, since what we asked of Him requires no special effort on His side.  "Lord, help my son to do well on his exams." Again, if your son studies hard and doesn't party the night before the test, he'll probably come out with a decent grade.  No particular intervention of God is necessary.  It makes me wonder when God hears our prayers if He doesn't say, "Really?  That's it?  How will you even know if I answer you?  Come on!  Give me something that comes from deep down in your soul; something that ONLY I can do!"  The supernatural power of God is a a mighty river that flows fast and deep.  We'll never experience the wonder and adventure that we are created for while we wade in the shallows - "testing" God to see if we can trust Him.  We have to dive in deep, over our heads, and let ourselves be carried away by the current of His mighty love.  It's frightening, even terrifying at times - but the alternative is to be content with just a taste, a whiff, a momentary thrill.  I'm diving in.

Snow Way

Our driveway at 2:30 am the morning of the big storm

Our Driveway as it looks today

Last year, all the ski resorts to the West of the Continental Divide had record snowfalls - up to 500 inches in some cases.  On our side of the divide (Denver and the Front Range) we had a record low snowfall.  This year the whole scenario flip-flopped and we've received probably 70-80 inches so far, while the resorts are barely hitting 50 inches at best.  What this means is a lower fire risk this coming summer and more income for those who plow commercially.  I'm just scratching the surface of plowing as sidebar way of earning a little extra cash, but I've already realized that the cost of maintaining and repairing my truck could easily outstretch what little income I may earn.  Now I understand why most guys who do this on a serious level use an old, beat up pickup instead of driving their primary vehicle.  Hmmm.  I'll have to see about that for next season.  The last big storm we had a little over a week ago dumped somewhere around 30 inches on Conifer, but Bailey (just 15 miles to the West) only got 5.  One of my friends from church works as a fireman down the hill, and since the storm coincided with his 48 hour shift he asked me if I would plow for his 12-15 clients.  I hate plowing blind, which means plowing someone's property that I'm not familiar with.  The reason being that it is too easy to break something on their property that I just can't see under all the snow, or break my truck in the process.  I tried to drive to as many of his properties as I could before the storm hit, but I was only able to see about half of them.  The snow started falling around midnight, and by the time I drove out of my driveway at 2:30 a.m. we already had 10 inches on the ground.  One of the addresses he gave me was on Broken Arrow Dr, and I only realized once I'd driven all the way over to Evergreen (15 miles out of my way) that there are actually THREE broken arrow roads between Evergreen and Conifer.  That wasted an hour of precious time, as the snow was getting deeper by the minute.  The first homes I got to had about a foot of snow, and since these were new properties to me I had to get out of the truck and trudge through the thigh-deep snow with a big spotlight and a ski pole, poking around as I tried to figure out where the driveways actually were.  I saw one of the homeowners peeking out of his window, probably wondering what in the world I was doing out there.  And with the number of guns per capita in Conifer, I was probably taking my life in my own hands!   Amazingly I got through 12 driveways without an incident, and without getting seriously stuck either.  As you can see in the picture above, sometimes the snow was actually coming over the top of the plow blade as I "swam" through 3-4 foot drifts.  It was a crazy couple of days.

The big snowfall provided a good excuse to pull a practical joke - as my friend Phil did when he filled the bed of my truck up with snow with his front-end loader.  Took me and two other guys 20 minutes to shovel it all out.  I'm still plotting my revenge.  I sent him a text message to make sure he knew that I was on to him, and in typical Phil Phashion he replied: "Let me start my three part apology by reassuring you on your smashing good looks... moving on to how merciful we should be to one another... and finally... Josh did it!"