Traveling

Everybody's traveling.  It blows my mind the number of miles we put behind us.  My 3 month old will soon make his 5th trip from KC to Chicago, 500 miles.  The sad fact is that won't impress some people.  We are all travelers. We travel for the holidays and for family.  We travel for vacation, to get away, and then to come home when we've been away too long.  Even those that hate it still travel.  We say we are forced to do it.  Forced by what though? Why are we all really traveling?  We claim many reasons.   But are we really forced?

Jonathon Edwards, the puritan pastor, would have a problem with my statement.  He would say we are not forced to do anything.  We choose it.  We choose to see family, visit friends, reprioritize our lives to our own new expectations of ourselves.  We choose our own tortures and then choose when we complain about them.  He would say there is only one will at function in my life, and it cannot be divided.  It is the choice that I make and nothing else. I wonder if in all this traveling I should not sit back and wonder who I'm traveling for.  If it's my choice, what kind of a choice is it?  Why do we travel?  What does it tell me about my will and myself?  What does it reveal about my values?  Why am I traveling? Why are you traveling?

Gearing up for the New Year

The year 2010 was a really tough year for our family.  Things like totaling a car became petty nuisances compared to the weightier things of life.  We attended three funerals that we did not expect going into the year.  We had some shocking medical bills.  We even had our house on the market for exactly 24 hours. But there were some awesome things as well.  There was an unexpected move in our lives as I became the Teaching Pastor at Birchwood Church. Our oldest started kindergarten.  We brought our fourth child into the world, a boy, now there are four sons, my poor wife. A new-to-me car, same year make and model but I liked the old one before someone decided to tackle it with their car at the corner of 39^th and Phelps, now a new-to-me car.  

Now as we sit just days from closing out this year, we are all forced to look over the past and think on the things we want to and the things we don’t. The more we resist, the more we seem to engage in this self-evaluation. The good decisions and the bad, the fun times and the not fun, the parties and the lonely moments nobody else knows about, the fights and the make-ups, all of them now go on the shelf in our memory waiting to be dusted off later and laughed about.  And isn’t it funny that we do always seem to laugh about them all.  The worse the memory, the better story it makes.

As we approach 2011, at a time when we all consider the vows we will make for the New Year, repenting to ourselves, our families and friends, and even to God, I hope the humor we find in the past points out some hidden aspect of God’s work in our lives.  Could it be that salvation is so wonderful, that the worse the memories, the more joy we will gain?  Can God be so powerful as even to redeem our past?  Can Joy really work its way backward through time.  I hope so.  I hope that this transition to a New Year brings you Joy and Hope and Blessings, but I hope even more that it brings you fondness for the way God has worked in your past, and is still working now.  Who knows how we will look back?

Happy New Year!

1st Attempt

We all try things more than once, but we'll just call this my first attempt at Birchwood blogging.  It's the first attempt in this current format anyway.  I fear spending time writing a blog no one wants to read. As well, the point here is community.  I want this blog to be a place for Birchwood to respond as a community to what is happening in our community.  So it's guided discussion.  Sunday mornings have been wonderful interpreting the Bible together.  I would love nothing more than for this site to be an extension of that time in our worship.