Presby-Musings

I've spent a lot of time in the past several months trying to figure out God.  I struggled to understand what God was doing, where God might be leading, and whether to interpret the things I was feeling and experiencing as signs from God or just my own desires or wishes.   Over those months I pored over the Bible, sought inspiration from a variety of Christian authors, poets and songwriters.  I asked for advice from friends--hoping they would help me figure out God in my context even if they couldn't figure God out in their own.  And then I remembered something that I witnessed many years ago, while on a mission trip in Mexico.   One of the older teenage girls, who had been on multiple mission trips to the same site with us, came to me with a lament.  She launched into a long, convoluted diatribe about how she just wasn't "feeling it" on that particular trip.  She told me that she just wasn't feeling God "this time," and she'd been count...

Tonight my wife and I had dinner with her cousins Mark and Alisa Langley, who are two 40-something former Registered Nurses who gave up a nice life here in the United States and moved to Thailand to live in intentional community with the Thai people.  Their organization provides scholarships for about 16 Thai teenagers to attend school, live and work together in community with Mark, Alisa, their two children, and their mission partners.   They embrace the outcasts in Thai society---tribal hill people, those who are infected with HIV, the poor---as an outpouring of their Christian love.  There's no door to door evangelism here, no huge healing services with loud, boisterous, hellfire and brimstone preachers.  Just simple people living among the world's poor, demonstrating the kingdom of God.   Their ministry to those who are infected with HIV is incredibly moving.  In Thai culture, misfortune is heaped upon those who are wicked or inherently bad.  If you are infected with HIV...

Okay, If you are wondering why I am starting with a Pt. 2... Just so you are aware, Pt. 1 to this little essay can be found HERE .  I am currently working on a sermon series that explores the Great Ends of the Church.  You can listen to these sermons online .   Here's something that I have found to be true... Fear and anxiety are at the heart of every controversy, division or argument that has occurred and will occur within the Church, the Body of Christ.  Seriously, scratch the surface of every schism and you will find a fearful and anxious people seeking to find meaning and stability in the only way they seem to know how to find it...  by fighting.  So when one of the elders in my former church began fomenting division within the congregation by complaining about our plans to take a small intergenerational group from the church on a mission trip to Mexico, I should have realized more clearly what was happening.  But I didn't.  Instead I took it personally, and got mad.  Hones...