So it begins…

The weekend got away from me. There was so much to do and so little time, it seemed. And in the midst of it all, I never did find a quiet moment during which I could put out my nativity set. That quiet moment finally arrived tonite.

After all the hustle and bustle of the day was over, after I’d had my nightly phone call with my Mom, after the puppy had finally been fed, there was time. No plans, no emails that had to be sent, no chores that had to be done. Just time.

So I loaded my “Everything Christmas” playlist onto my iPhone and set it into its speakers. And as some of my favorite Christmas music began to play, began to unpack my set from its boxes. This is a favorite ritual of mine.

I first saw my nativity set in a store window in the Pickering Town Centre mall, when my parents and I lived in that city. It stopped me dead in my tracks and my Father (with whom I was running errands) had to come back to get me. And we spent a few minutes together, still in the midst of the bustling mall, marveling at how these figures told the story with beauty and simplicity. And how we could still be struck silent by the story these figures told.

A few Christmases later, my Mom and Dad bought me the first pieces in my set. For a couple of Christmases they added to it, until the whole set was mine. Every time I take it out of its boxes I am reminded of the reason for this season. And I am reminded of the faithfulness of my parents, who taught me the story of God’s saving love coming to earth in the form of a helpless baby.

This is the beginning of my Advent season. This is the beginning of all the preparations, all the decorating, all the little steps that will lead to the celebration of Christmas 2012. For me, in this quiet, worship-ful moment, it has begun very well.

The whole set (and stockings for me, Koski and Spot).
The centre piece.
The Wise Men.
A shepherd and some animals.

Anticipation…

I’ve alluded to the fact that Advent is almost here. Where I live, signs of Christmas are beginning to pop up all over the place. I came out of my house for choir practice this evening and noticed that some of my neighbors have put up their Christmas lights. We have begun practicing Advent anthems at choir. And there are signs on all of the streets surrounding my house warning that the streets will be closed this Saturday for the Santa Claus parade.

I always have a struggle at this time of year. Truth be told, I am sorely tempted this weekend to put up both of my Christmas trees, my nativity set and my lights and decorations on the front porch. I want to rush into it.

I have a problem with wanting to rush things before their time. I have a problem with, a lack of, patience.

But I am trying to take my time this year. I WILL put up my nativity set this weekend, but I will hold off on the trees and lights until the end of the month. Because it isn’t time yet. Advent is a season of anticipation. To anticipate you have to hold off a bit. You have to have patience. You can’t just rush to the good stuff, you’ll miss the anticipation entirely.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NLT) says:

Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.

I am trying to let things be beautiful in their own time. Instead of rushing them along. I love the thought that there is eternity in our hearts, but we still can’t see all of what God is doing. Is t that the truth about humanity? We have some sense of longing for – and even some understanding of – the things of God. But we can never fully understand them.

In the end, God remains a mystery. And for once, that is not causing me concern or anxiety. Instead it seems inordinately beautiful.

In December, in its time, I will begin my second annual Advent Blog. Until then, may we all find rest in the One who is the most beautiful mystery.

Something new…

If you visit my blog regularly, you might notice that I’ve changed the look of it today. It just felt like it was time for something new – some new colors and fonts and, of course, a picture of me and my puppy.

I was thinking how good it felt to return to blogging last night, and how positive I was feeling about this new season in my life. It just seemed that it would be good to acknowledge that in visual way. So I redecorated my blog space. For someone with my personality type, new often feels scary. But in this case, new is just feeling good.

The Bible promises that:

…anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT

Sometimes, in the life-long journey of faith, that is hard to remember. Sometimes it feels like everything is the same old, same old.  Sometimes you just have to change the way something looks to remember the deep and abiding truth that in Christ all things are being made new.

I hope you like the new layout and color scheme as much as I do (I know, it’s really girly…but then, so am I!).

Seasons…

I should know this by now, but I seem to have to learn it over and over and over again: to everything in life, there is a season (my own paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 3:1). For the past couple of weeks, I have been going througha silent season, in which I haven’t felt much like blogging. My energy has been lower than normal, the days have gotten darker and colder, and generally I have just felt too tired to write.

So, not the greatest season. But. BUT, the thing about seasons is that they change. From one to the next, they transform. And today, I truly feel like I have turned a corner. I am entering a new season. I feel words pressing against my brain, waiting to be written down and shared. I feel hope, like a warm glow in my chest, beginning to grow. I feel close to God in a way that I haven’t for a little while.

No one knows what tomorrow will bring, but for the first time in a while, I find myself anticipating tomorrow with a smile instead of a grinding of teeth. I am entering – I hope, and I pray, and I worry about even writing it out because, O God, what if I jinx it?! – a good season.

Advent is not far away (two more Sundays! YAY!) and I am anticipating this season of anticipation.

You know what? I am just happy and blessed and thankful and aware of all the things for which I ought to be thankful. It’s a good place to be, and I wish all seasons could be like this. Still, I know the tough seasons have so much to teach me, and they make the good seasons shine all the brighter.

My friends, whatever season you are in, may you know that God is with you there. May you feel His peace surrounding you in times of trial and may you sense His delight in times of rejoicing.

On suffering…

Probably one of the biggest struggles In a life of faith has to do with why God allows suffering. Some ask the question this way: why do bad things happen to good people?

This year at Catalyst, Matt Chandler took this subject on. It is a powerful thing to hear a man who has battled brain cancer speak on suffering. He knows of what he speaks.

One of the theories – that doesn’t solve the problem of suffering, but at least gives an understanding of the role of suffering in the life of faith – is that God uses our suffering to teach us what we could not otherwise learn. It is through that lens that Matt Chandler spoke.

He said, “It is not unloving of God to wound you now so that you might have eternity with him. It IS unloving of God to save you from pain now and allow you to spend eternity apart from him.”

If what is at stake is eternity spent with God, then suffering becomes less of a horror. I would rather walk through the valley now and know that I am a citizen of Heaven, and when I die eternity in the presence of a loving God awaits me, than avoid suffering now and lose out on eternity with God.

Matt Chandler also said this: “God is going to do surgery to cut out some of what is killing us that we don’t even know is killing us…Jesus does not drive an ambulance, he is not going to show up when it is already too late.”

I found this profoundly comforting.

So let me leave you with this quote from the Apostle Paul, who knew a little bit about suffering:

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”
Romans 8:18

A little phrase…

Catalyst is a big conference. Thirteen thousand attendees. Twenty countries represented. I lost count of the number of laptops in the sound pit.

In just two days a massive amount of information is thrown at those of us who have gathered to take it in. One of my friends calls it “drinking from the fire hose” and he’s not wrong. There is so much to take in, that it is impossible to catch it all.

But even in the midst of all of that, each time I am there, I find I am struck by one little phrase that one of the speakers throws out. Often it’s not the main point of their talk. It’s just something that, for one reason or another rings in my ears and rolls around in my brain.

This year that little phrase comes from Matt Chandler. He said, “God works in the mess.”

And I thought – Thank God! Because life IS messy. It is unpredictable. None of us know what tomorrow will bring.

And that might be overwhelming.

Except that God works in the mess. And that means, no matter how messy the day, or the conversation or the meeting or the issue, God is at work in it.

David wrote these words in the midst of being hunted and living in caves to keep his enemies from finding him:

But I trust in you, O Lord;
I say, “You are my God.”
My times are in your hands
Psalm 31:14-15a

He wrote this, I believe, because he understood this little phrase: God works in the mess.

Of Fairy Stories and Lions…

I have always been drawn in by fantasy stories (CS Lewis called them “fairy stories”). My Dad read The Lord of the Rings – the entire trilogy, plus The Hobbit, a chapter at a time – to my brother and I at bedtime when I was eight years old. And then followed that up with the Narnia tales.

I loved and continue to love The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As a story itself and as a retelling of the Great Story that God has been telling since the creation of the world.

Aslan has become an important icon for Christ for me. So it should come as no surprise that I love lion images. I have a large black and white photo of a lion over the mantle in my dining room. When I saw it in the store, my father was with me and I grinned at him and said, “Look, Dad, it’s Aslan!” Then I bought the picture and brought it home. So that whenever I see it, I would be reminded of the One who loved me enough to lay down his life for me.

So on a day like today, a day that has been long and full of wrestling with difficult issues, I find an image like this comforting:

To me…this is Jesus communing with his Heavenly Father, who happens also to be my Heavenly Father.

Let me leave you with this declaration from First Peter:

What a God we have! And how fortunate we are to have him, this Father of our Master Jesus! Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven—and the future starts now! God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all—life healed and whole.

1 Peter 3:3-5 MSG

PS – I promise tomorrow I will be back to blogging about Catalyst!

Celebrity…

One if the ideas that ran through many of the talks given at Catalyst this year was the danger of celebrity. For Canadian pastors, this might sound like a uniquely American problem. I mean, after all, in the Canadian context a “mega-church” is one that has over a thousand members (as opposed to the American benchmark which I would put at around 5000+). At one of the conferences I attended in Atlanta, I heard a pastor say, “Hey, when we started out, we were a small church, too. In those days we only had 1,500 people on a Sunday.” This was at an Orange conference, which focusses on family ministry, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to hear the same sort of statement made by Catalyst attendees. There is no doubt that church is bigger in the USA. The world of church is very different south of the border.

So any of us who toil away in Canadian church world, where a big church has a Sunday attendance of 200+, might be tempted not to heed the warnings about celebrity. How famous can one actually be when your whole congregation is less than a hundred people?

But I have long held the theory that the cult of personality, the problem of celebrity, is just as pervasive in a small church as in a large one. All pastors find themselves put on a pedestal at one point or another. Sometimes it is because we helped a family through a crisis. Sometimes it is because of our teaching. Sometimes it’s nothing at all that we did, but simply the fact that our congregants may have been raised to think of their pastor in an elevated way.

The trouble starts if we start to believe our own legend. When we do that…well, we start to find our identity in things other than that unshakeable child-of-the-King-ness that I wrote about the other night. Our identity isn’t changed. Nothing can change the fact that we are children of the King. But it is like we develop identity amnesia. We forget that our hope, our joy, our life is found in the fact that we are children of the King. We start to look for life in other places…in the adoration of those we are leading, or the successes we are experiencing in our leadership.

And the reality is: that never satisfies. We are children of the King. Everything other than His love falls flat.

Take a deep breath and a long hard look at your life, and ask yourself this: are you looking for life-joy-hope-peace-affirmation from anything other than God’s love?

If so let me share with you something Jon Acuff said during the conference (told you I’d end up blogging about him more than once): the Living God of the Universe knows your name…and that is as famous as you will ever need to be.

Laughter….

One of the things Catalyst does well, is engage its attendees on many levels. There are highly intellectual speakers who deliver a tonne of information in a short talk. There are highly charismatic leaders, who bring emotions bubbling to the surface through the power of their words. There is good (LOUD!) music, and art and and amazing things to experience (this year, there was literally a beat-boxing cellist. SERIOUSLY!).

And emceeing through all of the inspirational, exciting, eye-opening presentations, are Tripp and Tyler. They’re a sketch comedy duo, and their job is to make the conference fun. They mock some of the speakers (this year, there was a segment where they had an Andy Stanley doll, a Craig Groeschel doll, a Francis Chan doll and a Rob Bell doll…I was just about in tears, I was laughing so hard!), they do give-aways and they make announcements to keep us informed of all that is happening at the conference.

But what they are really there to do, is to make the attendees laugh. Because there is joy in following Jesus. When you live life knowing that you are deeply and profoundly loved, it is easy to laugh. We should be able to laugh at ourselves (there are a lot of denominational jokes!) and experience joy together.

So to make you laugh, here is Tripp and Tyler’s wrap-up video:

 

Identity…

One of my favorite things about going to a conference is discovering new things. Whether it’s a new band, or a new speaker or a new author or a new perspective on an old story that Jesus told. Doesn’t matter, I just love discovering that I don’t know everything there is to know in my faith.

This year I discovered Jon Acuff.  He’s a blogger, so I had to like him, right? He was also a great speaker. He didn’t speak for long (maybe 15min, while the big guns got 45min), but his talk stands out to me as one of the most influential things I heard at Catalyst. I’m sure I’ll blog about him more than once.

But what is on my mind tonite is something Acuff said about the Prodigal Son. I loved that he used THAT story as his teaching Scripture, as it is one God has used to shape my life in powerful ways. Acuff zeroed in at one point on that moment when the prodigal returns home, and he has this whole speech prepared to say to his father. He’s going to admit what he did wrong, and then he’s going to ask his Dad to make him like one of the hired men. Only, he never gets to give the whole speech. He admits that he was wrong, and then he is cut off by his loving Father who just wants to throw a party because his Son is home.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Acuff said that the reason the son never got to give the “make me like one of the hired men” part of his speech, is that none of his experiences during his ‘wild living’ days could change his identity.  His identity was already set. No amount of squandering could change the fact that he was a son.

And it is the same for us. We are children of the King, sons and daughters of the Living God. And God will not ever, cannot ever, make us like one of the hired men. That is not who we are.

No matter how bad we screw up, no matter how broken we become, no matter how many failures we wrack up. We are still children of the King.

I need to know that. I need to hear it over and over again, because there is a very human part of me that wonders – always and eternally – if I am enough. I have to tell you, it is hard for me to admit that. I am struggling right this second to NOT delete that sentence. I kind of want to.

But the thing is…it’s the truth. And it is the reason I found Acuff’s teaching on this old, beloved parable so life-giving. Seriously. That is the story I want to shout from the rooftops. That is the truth I want to give my life to. That is the one thing I want to tell everyone: you are a child of the King, and all your squandering will NEVER change that. Your identity is set. You are enough.

And Jesus died so that your identity would never ever change. You are a child of the King.