Onething Forever

This past week Sarah and I popped in on the Onething youth conference in Kansas City. With roughly 12,000 youth crammed into the old memorial auditorium, I was immediately aware of my age. Although 26 is not entirely aged, in a crowd of roughly 11,500 teens and early twenty somethings, I felt awash with youth and saw the looks of stress and strain of countless youth pastors and parents. We worked our way through the masses and landed ourselves about halfway up the auditorium to the right of the stage. It was an excellent spot to watch the crowd and the stage.

As I stood there a few things seemed especially powerful to me. I remembered attending conferences very much like this in my youth with crowds caught up in prayer and worship. I remember being surrounded by my peers and feeling the swell of worship music, smelling the artificial fog, choking backing my own tears and good intentions, and treasuring those moments as pinnacle posts in my spiritual journey. As I sat there reminiscent, I realized that my own peers with the same passion I saw in these youth have largely slipped into silent lives of American productivity. A decade before they stood resolute that their life would impact the world. Now they change diapers, program their TIVO to record 24, and try to dig out of their college loans and credit card debt. I do not question the passion or good intentions of the youth at Onething or my peers. Rather, to realize that such passion dies because it has no environment to reinforce, protect, and utilize it following the youthful days of limited responsibility, is both heart-breaking and convicting.

It is significantly easier as a teen or college student to spend summers traveling the globe and exchanging your hard-earned summer job money for opportunities to help orphans, impoverished masses, and aids victims. Then, at some point there is a choice. Either you enter into "full-time" ministry as a missionary or pastor, or you get a regular job. There is little middle ground. Either you choose passion (and most likely your own poverty) or practical providence. It's as if a void has been created between the two worlds (sacred and secular) and they cannot be easily united in our current Western system of separation of church and state. I think this that this inability to find a visible context, mentoring, and support in integrating personal passions into a Westernized lifestyle is the greatest hindrance to preserving the fire and zeal of youth.

I do not believe that my peers were not "truly committed" or faithfully expressing their desire to impact communities. I believe that they got married, found jobs, started popping out babies, and realized that they had to continue to work the system to pay the bills and provide. Most of them chose responsibility. While they did not intentionally sacrifice their passion, it became dormant from lack of use.

The deep dilemma of the modern Western church is that we do not understand the Kingdom of God. When scripture extolled that all of the Earth is God's and it is ripe with praise of His glory, we reduced His sphere to a specific set of experiences and realms of operation. We allowed and encouraged the institutionalization of Christianity and chose a set of predictable contexts to contribute to our spiritual lives. We unknowingly accepted that Sundays from ten to noon, occasional charitable contributions, a Bible study here and there, and volunteering our time would be our context to flesh out our lives before God. I in no way condemn any of these practices and would honor the sacrifices of those who choose to express their love of God and fellow man in these contexts.

However, if the whole Earth is His, then the intricate inner workings of it all were spoken into existence and praised by His mouth: the spinning of planets, the pull of gravity on a riverbed, the inherent value in minerals and elements, the principles of growth and investment, electricity traveling along wires, the elimination of disease through chemical compounds... What has happened has been the separation of a world that was meant to be actively redeemed in its entirety in praise to Him.

I mourn inside to know that much of the passion I saw at Onething will wane as these youth become adults with adult responsibilities. I do not currently know what the practical solution to creating a Kingdom culture is, but it is something of great importance in my heart and mind.

I invite you to enter into discussions and prayer of what it would mean for to fully integrate spiritual and practical life, to see every context in life as a potential place of worship. I do not believe the current institution of the Church is a reflection of Kingdom living. I do not believe that such a small portion of people leading "ministry" lives even remotely reflects God's interest and authority in the planet. What would it take to change the accepted mindset? What would it take to see education, business, parenting, communication, retail and service industries, etc become places where believers actively worship God and demonstrate Kingdom principles? What if we became a force in community development, life-skills training, and conflict resolution? What kind of mentoring and ongoing support would we need to see personal passion utilized to impact local communities through whatever occupation was pursued in school? How do we, as mentioned in the letter to the Romans, become living sacrifices no matter which context of life we earn a wage from? We need to reclaim all of creation as a potential source of worship and ministry.

This is also part of the message of Sacred Salvage... not only about the redemption of lives shattered by pain, rejection, and failure, but the reclamation of a future that sees any place on the Earth as a stage to build the Kingdom of God, fulfill personal passions and heavenly callings, and bring worship to God wherever you are. I believe that this is the message of the Gospel and the Kingdom.

I just struggle to accept limiting ministry to such a small, specific context and narrowing worship to the weekend experience we have come to accept. There has to be more. It is not right that youth struggle with a choice to "go into ministry" or "abandon their callings". I don't think that God desired us to gradually slip Him into a place on our weekly calendar and live apart from Him during the week.

On a side note: The thing I have asked God for in 2007 is that He would teach me how to walk beside Him. It is so easy to want to know what is "required of us" in order to keep God happy with our contribution, but I believe that this kind of attitude is opposite of what scripture teaches. As far as I can tell, we are invited to walk beside Him... to place His yoke on our shoulders, buddy up with Him, and plow our fields together. Since we are not placed behind Him or in front of Him, but rather yoked beside Him, I believe that this reflects a partnering relationship, despite the fact that He is clearly the stronger one. If our relationship with Him is the foundation of all we attempt to accomplish in our labor, then any moment can become a friendship with God moment. Any field we enter together becomes our "mission field". I believe learning to walk beside God and share a relationship with Him in all circumstances is foundational to building His Kingdom.

So, this is what I am thinking about right now. There is more, but I do not think I can adequately express it right now.

Happy New Year!

There and Back Again - A Honeymooner's Tale

Josh & Sarah etched permanently in the sand

Sarah chumming it up with Edgar Allen Poe - We ate his hamburgers!

Magnolia Plantation House

A Congregation of Cypress Knees at Magnolia Plantation

Swamp Forest

Hugs in the swamp

Arrrrrrrrr.... I found me booty!!!

A friendly face at the aquarium....

Impersonation is truest form of flattery...

Who is that cute couple with the cannon?

Sarah getting friendly with the locals...

I behaved myself so Sarah let me ride the wagon!!!

The birds really like Sarah, as you can see.

A plethora of protruding palmettos

Carolina Coast

Charleston Bridge

the happy honeymooners...

Redemption Draweth Nigh

The New Year is always an interesting time to stop, reflect, and assess your life. I do not believe that the specific date is significant, but remembering to change the number at the end of the date is so memorable, that we recognize the changing of a season in our lives. Maybe it is Dick Clark (or one of the many Dick Clark clones), or maybe it is the giant lit orb transcending down a crowded New York shopping district; perhaps it is staying up past midnight and smooching your sweetie. For some reason, we emotionally honor the changing of the Roman calendar year. We cherish it. Every year, it is typically something like this, "Wow, last year was hard... but I am going to accomplish all the things I plan to in the New Year. This year will be different." The Jewish religion has a set of holy days that they honor called Yom Kippur. For them, Yom Kippur is a time to look inward, take inventory of your life, and then look outward to those in your life.

Whether the end of the year or some other holiday, reassessing our lives is critical. Marking the close of one season and the beginning of the next is essential to maintaining sanity. We have to lay down all our old "shoulds" and "oughts", catch our breath, decide that there is still something worth fighting for in life, and get up. We have to brush the dirt off our face, stop hiding in the bunker, and force ourselves to take ground again. I know for many, it is much easier to stay hidden under the passage of time, watching the years pass, and cursing the wasted opportunities. Somewhere along the way, hope was sacrificed at the hands of unmet expectations. It was easier to let it die than believe that life could be better, different.... redeemable.

For years now, I have counseled friends, as they walked through personal destruction and pain, that they cannot sacrifice their hope. Rather, the only safe option is to place one's life in the hands of God, trusting that He alone can redeem it. There is no loss so great that redemption is no longer a possibility. There is nothing so broken that God cannot reform it into something more beautiful than its original state, if we will trust it to Him. We do not get to dictate the personal choices of others. Nor do we get to erase the consequences of destructive choices or return those long separated from our lives. However, the end of our individual stories is not yet written. There is always hope for redemption, for new life out of the ashes.

Having shared this repeatedly with others, I did not fully anticipate that my own words would be tested beyond what I had thought possible in my own life. As this year closes and I take inventory, my story is rewriting itself. What I share here I do not share to honor pain, glorify my struggles, or make myself look entirely innocent in my own story. Rather, I share it for those of you who let your own unmet expectations crucify your tender hope. I hope that you too, lay it all in the hands of God, and trust Him to author the story of your life. I pray that you take the pen out of the greasy hands of past pain and place your faith in the author of redemption to finish the story for you.

The past decade of my life went like this. Being a rather highly motivated firstborn child, I fought to succeed. My own natural abilities allowed me to rely heavily on myself for most of the progress in my life. In high school, during the summers I traveled around the globe working with orphanages, tribal villages, and inner-city communities. My associate's degree was pursued at a Bible School in Florida. The zeal fostered by the school only added to my performance predicament, and I left fully expecting to save a city for Jesus within a few years of graduating. Looking back, the innocence of my passion was beautiful, but my character has been tempered and tested in recent years. I wish I could combine my now wisdom with my then zeal.

Following Bible School, I married my high school girlfriend, fully believing that we would live as missionaries and grow old together. After a summer of working and saving, we moved to Kansas City to partner with an inner-city church-planting organization, that is an organization whose chief missional strategy is to create new churches in different communities. Together, we worked with this organization mentoring youth, leading worship services, preaching, teaching, helping with a food pantry, and hosting mission teams to the inner-city. During our time working with the organization, we accrued significant debt as we did not take a salary from the organization, but trusted in the donations of friends to pay the bills. At this point, we were forced to renegotiate our role within the organization, and take regular jobs during the week to pay the bills.

During the 5 years that we worked with the organization, it struggled with burning out its volunteers and support leadership. Point leadership was controlled by a single man. He was well-intentioned, intelligent, and possessed a charismatic charm. Although he was a gifted visionary, he struggled to build the organization. He could see what he wanted, but struggled to utilize his resources to establish something that would last. The answer to most issues within the organization was to recast the vision. If people were struggling and portions of the work were failing, it was assumed to be due to the lack of people embracing the vision. My experiences there taught me a great deal about the need for humility, accountability, and shared leadership within a church. Today the organization is still struggling to develop momentum and create something lasting. For what it is worth, there are a number of deeply precious people in the organization. It is not the quality of the people, rather how they are connected and how they attempt to accomplish their goals that has hindered them. For better or worse, this time was the greatest period of personal education in my life. Seeing efforts succeed, efforts fail, and the ups and downs of the lives of those I loved was deeply impactful and educational - albeit humbling and painful.

During this same period, my wife found a veritable feeding ground of broken people who "needed" her. Moving from one needy relationship to next, my marriage became a cohabitating friendship. From her perspective, my role was to alleviate the responsibilities of house maintenance, life management, and financial management while also meeting a specific list of emotional needs. Her expectations of me were great. When I failed to meet these expectations, she threw herself all the more into ministry, worship leading, and need-to-be-needed relationships. Due to her way of coping with disappointment, she appeared to those in our church to "buy-in" at a much greater level than I. She was applauded and praised for her sacrifices and time commitment to meeting the needs of others, all while I lived very much alone in the marriage.

After five years of marriage, with the support of the head leader, she chose to separate herself from me and move to Colorado. One of her newer influential friends, who had recently completed an extended separation and divorce, moved to Colorado with her. During the seven months of separation, I paid both sets of bills, attended weekly marriage counseling, and tried my best to lay some ground to rebuild a marriage. I was met with bitter judgment, accusation, and a list of demands greater than I could ever rationally or personally agree to. During this time the leadership of the organization supported her stand and demands, saying the failure in any marriage is always 100% the responsibility of the husband. I was told by the man who had been a father and a mentor to me, that if I did not take 100% responsibility for the breakdown in the relationship, that the death of the marriage would be my fault.

The separation and what it meant to me seemed to swallow my life. I spent about two hours a day weeping and praying. I stopped eating, sleeping, and felt very much on the verge of losing my mind. The organization I had given five years of my life to, turned their back on me. My previous mentor said to a faithful friend of mine that I was a hopeless case. Any attempt at communication with my estranged wife was met with threats of extended separation and divorce. I was given a list of required behaviors from her and told that if I complied with them for 6 months and did not attempt to speak to her, that she would attend a single marriage counseling session with me. I found myself instantly cut off from 95% off all the people who I would have wanted to depend on. My support came from my family in North Carolina and three friends in Kansas City (thank you... you know who you are). In the midst of this, my car was totaled, my back was injured, and I was laid off as a result of corporate restructuring within a single week. I will not linger on this any longer, but the only word I can use to describe this period in my life is devastation.

On a side note, one of the greatest moments of freedom for me came when I accepted that my wife and those who had been in my life had a right to make their own choices. I accepted that it was not my responsibility to try to convince them to make other choices or pursuade them to believe differently about me. I accepted that it was not my responsibility to defend myself or my reputation. This was tremendously freeing, as the battle to find some place of influence was one of the greatest sources of frustration and confusion.

Finally, I began to accept and release this experience and the choices of these people to God. I chose to forgive those who had betrayed me. I stood up, caught my breath, and laid my hope in His hands. It was my only way out of the confusion and pain. I could have spent a lifetime trying to alter the situation, rethinking what I could have done differently, and dwelling on my sense of injustice.

About 13 months ago today, I indirectly found out that my estranged wife had filed for divorce. I found this out through a friend of a friend. This announcement was met with one more email sent from the head leader of the organization implicating my fault and guilt in the situation. Despite my detailed confession of my failures to my estranged wife, my counselor, and over 20 other people, my financial support throughout this period, my regular attendance to marriage counseling, and my near constant effort to try to correct this situation... this was in his estimation, due to my lack of embracing responsibility rightly.

Around that time period, I began attending a church in the area with a consistent history in the community, began exercising and attending to my body, worked diligently to rediscover who I was, and decided to not give up on my life. I reassessed my life, allowed God to revive my hope, and chose to believe what I had counseled to several others - that redemption had to be my reality... my life could be redeemed.

I write today, roughly a year later, as a very different man. I am happily married to a marvelous woman. I do not know that I could properly express my joy and gratitude for the gift Sarah has been in my life. She is daily a source of support and friendship. While our relationship has not been without its own bumps and bruises, our conflict resolutions skills and commitment to voluntarily and mutually contribute to the relationship has been admirable. I am deeply proud to call her my wife and friend.

From a physical perspective, I have lost just at 80 pounds. I weigh less than I did in high school. I went from wearing size 40 pants and a XXL to wearing size 34 pants and a medium shirt. While this may not seem emotionally significant, for me this was an area that I had given up hope in changing. I believed it was futile to try to change my body, as my many attempts to diet bore only spurious results. It was an outward sign of an inward change for me. While, I may not look like a model, I feel a great deal of joy in my transformation. For those of you wondering how this was accomplished: I ate right, ate less, and exercised several times a week ...the stuff that we all hate to do.

From an occupational perspective, I have received two promotions and three raises since I was laid off in May of 2005. I am currently earning double what I was a year and a half ago. While I am not one to preach financial prosperity, I believe that this could bring hope to those of you buried in debt. Also during this time, I completed my bachelor's degree in business management, and began my Master's degree.

Today, I am happy, healthy, humble, and tremendously grateful for the redemption I have seen and tasted. I do not want to lead anyone to believe that I attained a state of perfection in my previous relationship, nor do I want to imply that today's struggles are not still present. Rather, if there was a solitary message I would want to pour into the hearts and minds of others, it would be that there is always hope for redemption if you entrust your life into the hands of God. I cannot attribute my transformation to anything other than His supernatural grace and total commitment to love me. I cannot say that I was cutoff from His grace and love in my season of devastation. What He orchestrated to enter my story was allowed in love, not in abandonment or rejection of me. He was ever-present, though hard for me to see in the midst of my pain. Today, I am a different, reformed, and more whole man because of the experience. Each moment of past pain can be redeemed to be a source of strength and life today. This is my hope. This is my experience. This is my message.

While I could never justly compare my experience to that of anyone else, I believe that we have all had moments of personal devastation that were tailor-made to expose our deepest expectations and hidden fears. Either hope is crushed, or it is placed by faith in the hands of the one whom we can always trust to redeem, whether in this life or eternity. For me, this two-year experience was my deepest fear fleshed out in living color. Had I had stayed licking my wounds, storing up bitterness, and accusing God - I fear that I would have either killed myself or would be a monster of a man today.

Humility, confession, forgiveness, and faith are the only ways out of deep personal devastation. There are no easy answers, as I still have unanswered questions. But I decided that I would not let my pain, the past, or the piercing words and actions of others tell me who I was or whom I could become. There is only one who has ever had a consistent voice of love in my life - and only He has the right to tell me what I am worth and who I could become.

So today, I live by faith. I cannot foresee if today will bring pain or pleasure - or a mix of both. But whatever it brings, neither have the right to sway my identity. It is not up for argument based on the inconsistencies of life. I am loved, forgiven, adopted, redeemed, and brought in to build a Kingdom for a King.

I hope as this year ends, that all who read this find redemption drawing near to the damaged places in your own past. I hope that you find the courage to lay your life wholly, unabashedly, and vulnerably before God, no matter what comes. I hope that you discover that your story is not fully written and that the close your own journey can be radiant.

I wish you all a renewing new year, hope for tomorrow, peace for yesterday, and grace for today.

Back again

Hey everyone -

First I must apologize. I have been a very poor blogger lately. The last three weeks were filled with papers, finals, travel, our honeymoon, and some time celebrating Christmas with the fam. I'll post some pictures later this week. Sarah took the camera today to print some of the pictures.

Here's a bit of an update. Sarah sent out Christmas letters to several people - so this may be a repeat of previous communication.

Starting in the fall, I began my Master's degree at UMKC in Public Administration - specificially in Urban Management and Community Development. Being a bit nuts, I signed up for classes three nights a week.

In October, my job (with OfficeMax's corporate sales) was burdened with the several new accounts all rolling out at once. It is great to win new business, but I do not feel like I have had time to blink. In late October we were informed that the company would be restructuring all corporate sales office personnel. So we all had to reapply for new positions. I traveled to Chicago in November and interviewed for a regional position. Later in November, I was chose as one of eight hired to support the central US market. So, now my new vague title is Website Implementation Specialist. I will get to work out of my home in KC and travel around the central US as needed. We were also blessed with a significant raise in the promotion.

On November 11th, Sarah and I were married. It was a brisk and beautiful fall day. We were married in a little historic country chapel. Our friends and family came into town. It was an absolutely wonderful day. I do not believe I could have asked for more.

The week before Christmas Sarah and I flew out to North Carolina. My parents let us borrow a car for the week. We rented out a beach house on the Isle of Palms, about 20 minutes from Charleston, South Carolina. We had a marvelous week sight-seeing and enjoying the 70 degree weather. More pictures and stories to follow.

On December 22nd, Sarah and I drove back to Charlotte. That night Jared, my younger brother, proposed to his girlfriend, Heather. I was able to catch it all on my camcorder (thanks to Sarah - my Christmas present). Jared has taken up improv comedy. At the end of his group's show, they played world's worst - a line game where you say the world's worst thing to say at a _________ or the world's worst thing to say if you were a _________. Of course the line game was world's worst things to say at a marriage proposal. His group contributed about 10 gag proposals, then Jared got down on one knee and proposed to Heather. She did not know if he was joking or not for the first 3 seconds. Then she said yes, they hugged, and much love was shared by all.

Now having been married for a solid six weeks, I can say that I am a fan of marriage. Sarah is as well. We recommend it. Honestly, Sarah has been a deep blessing to my life. Not only is she brilliant and beautiful, but she is quick to give, support, forgive, and love. I keep turning the corner and find her contributing to our life together out of love for me. I love to give to her, but it is such a surprise to find her working so hard to build a life together with me. It is a new experience for me to receive such support.

One of the things that I enjoy the most about our relationship is that we both enter life with broad acceptance of people despite their quirks and personal struggles. It has been so fun to mutually share our family and friends and watch one another laugh with and enjoy each new person. It is just amazingly fun to leave our shared experiences savoring and enjoying our new combined family and friends.

On December 23rd, Jared, Heather, my grandma, my dad, my mom, Sarah, and I gathered around the Christmas tree and celebrated the birth of Jesus by eating turkey, telling stories, loving one another, and exchanging gifts. It was a beautiful day. Jared and Heather have two boxers, Braxton and Bella. They are great, slobbery dogs. They love to wrestle, chase the cats, drink water like it is going out of style, and compete for attention from all the people in the room. We had a great holiday.

Now, we are back in Kansas City. It was nice to lay down all the responsiblities of the daily grind for a bit. We had a sweet time together and shared some special moments with my family.

For now, I wish everyone a deeply restoring Christmas and a renewing New Year.

Follow me

This weekend I will be busily plunking away on my computer writing a paper for my master's class on leadership. As part of the class, I sent out questionaires for other's to evaluate my personal leadership history. I have to say that asking others to tell you what is right & wrong in your leadership is not what I would recommend if you are looking for an ego boost. By and large, most responses have been generous, perhaps too generous of my character. I do not think I would lift up my past as a banner of leadership for others to come around. But feedback is helpful.

Taking a course on leadership is a bit like studying the art of breathing. Yep, I can understand it and all the minutia of it. I can read great men's thoughts on oxygen mix, timing, and lung capacity - but if I don't breathe, my life is wasted. Knowledge about leadership is not really liberating. This is my fourth or fifth class on leadership in my lifetime, yet I don't know how much any of it has really helped the way I live. I understand more what my mistakes are...

So many men and women in the past appear to live such noble lives, but I wonder if they were present today if they would say the same about their own perceptions of their life. Because we can look back at them and we know the areas where they "won", it's easy to say - well, this is what they did right.

If I were to hold up a banner of leadership, it would simply be this, "I kept getting up." That's it. I think that resilience is one of the few leadership qualities that is a prerequisite for the others to show.

Well, that's my opinion at least...