escapingbabylon.com

So I’ve been doing this bible study with Matthew about shalom, and something hit me today, and it’s sort of typical of me missing the forest for the trees. I’ve realized that the bible paints pictures of a God, and people who intentionally and relentlessly chases shalom through active or aggressively reactive means. They seek shalom when society would be satisfied with you only doing what’s fair, they seek shalom even when the other party is potentially being deceitful, and they seek shalom even in the midst of a society that shares neither their values, nor their God.

I think that’s a call for us, to actively seek shalom wherever we can, to be shalom-chasers.

So the Hamline students are on break and Pilgrim has cancelled all activities because of the statewide Baptist Convention, giving me what almost amounts to a week off, except not really since I still have work.

This is all making me realize how much I depended on the school schedule to survive. I need those couple of weeks over Christmas and a month or two (or three) in summer. Or at least I really, really want them.

Anyway, I’m starting to notice seasonal patterns in my life. Things that seem to happen when it gets warm. The first is that I get creative, and start doing more art (I customized a shirt over the weekend). I also find myself getting restless, and I suspect that I post more “Personal” posts during the spring/summer as well. Actually as my domain name registration tells me, it was about a year ago that I moved everything here.

I think there is good in beginning to notice seasonal patterns, now the challenge is to adjust for them (and to really adjust to the fact that I am not on the school schedule).

That’s about all for now, this was mostly an “I’m not dead” post.  I’ve flaked on a couple things lately (comes with being overcommitted, which I suspect is another late-winter/early spring trend for me, so I’ll catch up this week. In particular, I want to follow up on the post directly below.

was from Kevin Farmer, currently of Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis.  He said, “What you feed will live, what you starve will die.” Recently I’ve been thinking about this in regards to Sunday morning services at Pilgrim. At some point I’m going to go in with a notebook and a stop watch and see what we are feeding and what we are starving. In particular, I want to look at :-

• How much time do we talk about things that serve the body, or things that reach outside the walls? How much do we celebrate each.
• How much do we talk about being blessed and how much do we talk about serving?
•  How much do we talk about performing arts ministries vs evangelistic ministries vs physical service ministries.
• How much do we talk about Jesus’ work vs. our work.
• How much we talk about going to church(or finding a church home, etc) vs how much we talk about following Jesus.

As one can suspect, I have my suspicions about what Pilgrim’s Sunday morning service looks like (and the possibility of that feeding into some of our deeper problems as a church). For now, however I’d like to gather some data. I’d also like to get data/help from anyone who is reading this. If you are willing, I’d like you to take a pen and a notebook/sheet of paper and record some of this next Sunday.  I’m going to post more about this later this week, but I think it may be an interesting experiment.

Test

Though I must admit, it was fun and hilarious for a time. Ladies and gentlement, I present to you from my senior year in college No Sex For Lent. I’m sure people can tell, but this was all tongue in cheek. The video is going to take a while to load, but it’s worth it.

Matthew, I have no idea where they found this, I blame Greg.

edit: fixed the link