the long pause

And with baited breath, they waited until they could wait no more. One by one they visited with dwindling frequency, losing hope that anything would change. I like to think that's the case, since my lack of writing leaves me as parched for deep thought exercises as just about anyone else. As is the usual case, my only pitiful excuse for my lack of any written words is of course my crazy schedule between life and work. A few short updates on those topics...

Work continues to keep me busy, such is the norm. Between career building tasks, project assignments, and the daily grind of maintenance I do not lack for things to do. At times I find this a blessing, and other times a curse -- the curse portion is usually when I am inundated by tedious, repetitious tasks which drives the creative side of me up a wall scrambling for some kind of relief.

In other areas of life, I've found a whole new arena of spiritual nourishment that I've been enjoying immensely. I've gotten involved in a new church plant in my area. And when I say involved, I mean that I am working with the core team of people who are forming the worship, generating the marketing, and overall doing a lot of organizing. In particular, my areas of influence have become designing and maintaining the website (duh!), as well as working with the Tech-A/V team which supports the audio and video aspects of worship. I've been discovering that I have a real knack for working the audio mixer for the worship team, and as a result I'm becoming a bit of the go-to guy in that arena. Of course, its hard to discover a new talent if you don't have talented people to work with, and it amazes me how quickly the worship team came together to create beautiful music which I love helping fine-tune. Maybe once I get a few more people up to speed on operating the board, which is 50% art since you need to have an ear for it, I might try my hand at joining the worship team. My guitar skills are rusty and spotty, but I think I could get them up to par enough to lend a hand. Check out the website, I'm excited about this whole endeavor.

Northwest Hills Community Church

On a slightly different topic, I'll leave you with a couple of thoughtful morsels to ponder. Why do certain Christians feel the need to use overly religious, or pseudo-righteous, and biblical language and/or trite phrases when they talk amongst themselves? For example: for the cause of Christ; remember, be holy as He is holy; etc and so on, you get the picture. I'm certain there are probably situations where this might not seem out of context, but when things get tossed in the mix of normal conversation it just sounds odd. Or maybe it's just me and I have a cynical side that just cringes every time I hear phrases that are just dripping with religious overtones and "Christianese." Just to clear things up right away, I'm not criticizing the people who do this or passing judgment, there are some really nice people who I've met who do this from time to time -- I just silently cringe and move on. So maybe the second question is, whenever we find a situation where we might normally toss out some religious/spiritual/biblical phrase, should we stop and think for a moment to ask the question: could I say this with plain speech, without religious overtones, and still make the same point?

Personally, I don't have much use for overtly religious phrases, I think they just cloud any issue you discuss. I find it much more constructive to take the insights we gain from scripture, apply them to the world around us, and use the resulting knowledge as our language and point of reference.

Oh, and on the ReGroup front, things are currently in stasis. Everyone who is involved is being pulled in a lot of different directions, so scheduling another meeting has been tough. We definitely will, it just might be a while... like, we're talking end of summer or into the fall.

domains and kingdoms

Good article today posted by Jason Clark, give it a read when you have 5 minutes.

A tale of two kingdoms: 3 Domains

Enjoy!

simple yet difficult

I'd apologize for the lack of posting, but unfortunately I have no excuse save the lack of new ideas and new progress on the various things going on in my life. On the book front however, I have finally gotten around to reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell -- suffice it to say, it is an awesome book. I am consistently amazed at what I perceive as God's influence in shaping the appropriate times in my life for me to stumble upon information that directly impacts things I am thinking about or experiencing. And as you might have surmised, Velvet Elvis was a book filled with ideas and concepts and stories that directly related to a lot of stuff going on with me or around me lately.

I think that if I were to take all of the information that I have absorbed from various books, including another perspective as added by Rob Bell, I could boil down my current insight to the following statement.

Being a Christian - following the way of life that Jesus taught - can be, more often than not, a difficult life... but it is very simple.

I know, I know... that sounds so contradictory and confusing, but let me give a quick illustration from my Christmas holiday. We gave my aunt and my mom a small puzzle, it consists of 9 squares that you must arrange into a 3x3 grid. The puzzle when completed will look like a Pennsylvania Dutch quilting pattern. Each square forms a portion of the pattern, and in order to connect to squares into the 3x3 grid that reveals the pattern, you need to match up some pictures. The squares' four sides have each have 1 of 8 images: the bottom or top of a blue "tulip", the bottom or top of a blue "rose", the bottom or top of a red heart flower, the bottom or top of a red "rose". There is only one solution to the puzzle. The concept is extremely simple, arrange the squares in a 3x3 grid so that the sides of the squares that touch form a complete flower (matched tops and bottoms). Would you guess that even after having 2 medical professionals, an engineer and computer scientist, a teacher, an environmental manager, and 2 quilters all try separately and teamed together in various combinations, we still haven't been able to solve that stupid puzzle! The game is simple, solving it is difficult. There are many combinations that nearly solve it and come up short by one square; also, there are times where you think you've gotten it licked, only to realize that you mismatched one element by mistake. However, there is an upside to this simple yet difficult puzzle -- we spent time together, we laughed, we talked while we played with it, we helped each other, we pointed out mistakes each other's mistakes when we noticed them to save future frustration. In short, no one got it perfect, but by simply knowing the guiding principles and giving it our best shot, we had some fun together.

The way of life that Jesus taught is an extremely simple life, but actually living it out everyday can be extremely difficult. Love your neighbor. How much more simple can it get? It's a profound statement with wide ranging implications, and yet we screw it up all the time. Certainly, we could ask what has already been asked; who is my neighbor? But there are even more complex situations that make that principle difficult to live out. I know my neighbor includes everyone that I come into contact with throughout my life, but how could I possibly love someone who wrongs me deeply? Say a loved one was killed by a repeat drunk driver; could you suppress your grief, anger, rage, loneliness, and utter sense of loss and love that neighbor? What if you were the victim of identity theft which then resulted in your house being foreclosed on, car repossessed, and required you to file bankruptcy before they caught the person responsible; could you love that neighbor?

Such a simple way of life, and yet so difficult to live it....

the un-meeting

In this instance, "un-meeting" does not refer to some interesting aspect of how ReGroup is different from other types of groups that exist out there. No, last night we had an non-meeting; or to put simply, there was no meeting. Due to some extenuating circumstances, the couple who had offered their home to host ReGroup for the evening had to cancel. The good news, is that things just like this -- life getting in the way -- are to be expected and must be given room. Sometimes other things just have to take priority, which can be a good thing. So, I'll be looking to reschedule this postponed kickoff for sometime after Thanksgiving when schedules allow. I hope to have at least one meeting, preferably two, before people start to disappear for Christmas.

So for those who were waiting on word, there it is... I appreciate your thoughts and prayers, hopefully it won't be much longer.

round one responses

A couple of weeks, a couple of questions, and now some responses. I'll apologize in advance, as I must not have been getting a refreshed page each time I checked the site (possibly a side-effect of migrating my blog to the new beta interface). Here I went a full week thinking no one had responded!

Trust and Openness
In response to my previous post, church regrouping, Jim brought up some key points of what will make ReGroup sink or sail. Trust and openness go hand in hand when attempting to create a safe environment for people to share and grow. Obviously, trust is something earned, so part of that process means that everyone understands the ground rules and someone has to start the cycle. Those ground rules being something of the variety: we respect each other's opinions even if we don't agree; we don't pass judgment on each other's personal decisions; criticism is to be done from an honest and loving attitude, without bitterness or vindictiveness; stories shared in confidence are to be kept within the group, only to be shared outside the group with the permission of the one who shared. When I say someone needs to start the cycle, I mean that openness starts with someone opening up. Since I'm going to be the initiator of the first ever incarnation of ReGroup, my most important job is to share my story honestly in small bites and ensure that others begin to feel they can trust me and each other to share their own stories and experiences. And obviously, as Jim mentioned, trust also comes from getting to know each other in different scenarios, so the ability to change up the format and venue allows different people's personality to shine through.

Living the Busy Life
As a response to a brief additional comment that Jim made, I felt it would be good to bring up that constant nagging aspect of the current American way of life: over-scheduling. We can get so busy in our lives that we often feel we couldn't possibly fit another thing into our schedules. However, it is interesting to note that we often find time to squeeze in things that we want to do, and use the "busy" excuse when something we should do comes up but don't necessarily want to do it. In order to avoid falling prey to the over-scheduling aspect, I think the ability to keep things flexible becomes crucial. Setting a regular day and time should be done, but with the caveat that should the need arise to move to another day or time it can be done to accommodate the group. As for the want/need problems... my advice would be the same for say, golf. If you want to play more golf, but don't often have time, you have to make the time. If it is something important to you, then you will find the time to do it. In this instance, you have to be willing to break the cycle of your life. Another golf analogy: you'd like to buy new clubs, but you don't play that often due to your schedule so you don't feel you can rationalize new clubs; however, if you bought the new clubs, wouldn't you make time in your schedule for more golf the next year in order to make the purchase worthwhile? Short version, you're only as busy as you allow yourself to become, and you are in charge of your schedule -- your schedule is not in charge of you. (Then again, I am an optimist...)

Keeping it Intimate
I think ideally that if the group can stay under 10 people, it would be to a greater benefit to the group's self-determined goals. I say this because smaller groups have a tendency to foster greater intimacy and stronger relationships between people. However, that doesn't mean that the group couldn't swell to above 15 people for a given meeting or event. One of the other important aspects is that the group should always feel open and inviting to anyone and everyone, so obviously there wouldn't be a group bouncer who turned the 16th person away. The key here is that the small nature of the group is designed to foster relationships and encourage strong bonds so that we can help each other in our journeys.

Evolving with Change
In order for the group to remain flexible, authentic, and relevant, it needs to be able to cope with change in group dynamics. One of the most obvious kinds of change is the fluid nature of the group. Everyone in the group, especially those committed to the community for the long haul, need to recognize that the group may serve some people for a short time. Hopefully, those we help will stay in touch, but we don't require them to stay in the group forever. Another kind of change to deal with is change brought on by growth, when the group starts getting close to 15 people or above on a regular basis. At that point, the best scenario is for at least 3 or 4 people to make the commitment to spin off another group. They wouldn't have to spin into a completely autonomous entity if they didn't want to; as Jim mentioned, I think drifting between groups would be good and occasional multi-group organized activities would be even better. Another kind of change might even be a group deciding that rather than spinning another networked-yet-independent group from itself, they choose to set down roots and form a somewhat more traditional church body -- weekly services, classes, leadership team, preacher(s), and of course ReGroups.

I like to think of the growth process like gardening; tomatoes for example. You plant the seeds, water them, ensure they get proper sunlight, remove weeds that would impede growth, and in the end you hopefully have a healthy plant that bears ripe tomatoes. But that's not the end, those tomatoes are chock full of seeds, which you could reserve during meal preparation for a couple of purposes. You could use the seeds to increase your yield of tomatoes next year, you could share the seeds with a friend to help them establish their own tomato garden, you could give the seeds to a school and offer to help teach children about how plants grow with them, etc and so on. The only limitation is the the self-placed one.

Keep the questions, ideas, and comments coming... they only help to further define an explore the many facets of ReGroup!