“Death is at your doorstep…you are not alone in this”

Death is a lonely thing.

Over the past year I have experienced more death than I ever expected at this point in my life. Within the past 12-14 months I have seen my grandfather, a friend of my best friend, my grandmother-in-law, and a few weeks ago my grandmother pass away. I think the most terrifying thing about death is the feeling of helplessness and being alone.

For me, being exposed to so much death confirms that we are not meant for this world. This world is full of pain, and suffering, and death, and sadness. Sin has taken hold of this world and corrupted what God intended to be perfect, and beautiful, and full of life. Now, instead of life, we have to deal with pain and suffering. Now, we experience death. That is until we are finally taken from this broken place and brought into the arms of the Kingdom. It is a beautiful thing to realize that we are not meant for this world, but for a better place, which our Father has prepared for us.

Shortly before my grandfather passed away, my dad overheard him say to my grandmother with failing breath, “I will look for you.” I think this is a beautiful picture of someone that knows that we are not meant for this world, but for a better place where all of our hurt and pain will be no more.

Love God. Love Others

I recently finished reading Jesus Creed for Students by Scot McKnight with Chris Folmsbee and Syler Thomas
.  Here is my review:

Scot McKnight, in his book, Jesus Creed for Students, invites students and young adults to critically look at the simple truth that Jesus commands his followers.  He invites students to live life before God, now.  McKnight explains that what he calls the Jesus Creed is Jesus’ command to love God and love others.  He stresses that the Jesus Creed is the very thing that Jesus wanted his disciples to practice.  Throughout Scripture if you look at all the commands you see that each command either comes down to loving God or loving others. Jesus wanted his followers to see that by loving God and loving others our lives will be dramatically different and we will be amazed at what we will see if we focus on these two commands.

It is important for students to understand that if we are to be disciples of Jesus, we need to obey what he commands us to do, and from Scripture, we see that we are called to love God with our heart, soul, and mind and we are to love others as ourselves.  This is where it starts if we are to become disciples of Jesus. In my experience both in my teenage years and being around teenagers, loving others as ourselves is one of the hardest things for students to grasp.  The world that we live in today tells us that we are to be the best and do what we can to get ahead of others.  However, as we see in Scripture, Jesus is calling us to a radically different lifestyle where we put others above ourselves.

McKnight goes on to talk about how most people are searching for happiness in life, it is what our culture is searching for. People do this through a number of different ways be it traveling, sports, music, and love to name just a few.  McKnight references a study that concludes that fifteen percent of the world’s developed countries suffers from depression.  The researcher of the study concluded that the cause of this depression was that we have

“abandoned the example of previous generations of living for something greater than themselves and instead sought to live only for their own happiness.”[1]

In today’s culture, it does seem that happiness is what everyone is striving for, however, maybe we are striving for the wrong thing.  Maybe instead of living for happiness, we should be living for God. Maybe we should be living to love God above all else and living to love others like we love ourselves. I think we as a culture (especially students) have our priorities mixed up and it is time that we get them back on track, the Jesus Creed track. By being the kind of people that God wants us to be, we will find happiness in the radically different life that Jesus is offering us.  Maybe we should stop trying to be happy, and start trying to be blessed (not in a material blessed way), or better yet, bless others.  McKnight says that it is better to be blessed than happy because,

“blessed carries us through the bad days while happy is only good on good days.”[2]

I think that students need to be challenged to live a life that is focused on God and by doing so, they will be blessed and be able to bless others.  The Jesus Creed offers us a revolutionary lifestyle that will change student’s lives if they commit to practicing loving God and loving others. We as student ministry leaders must commit to living the Jesus Creed ourselves as well so that we might be able lead students into a lifestyle of loving God with their heart, soul, and mind and loving others as they love themselves.

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[1]             McKnight, Scot. Jesus Creed for Students.  (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2011), 17

[2]             McKnight, Scot. Jesus Creed for Students.  (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2011), 21

“The world needs Christians who don’t tolerate the complacency of their own lives.”

I love this quote by Francis Chan.

One of the things that I like about our church is the community it is located in.  It is located in an area of town that is home to many different ethnicities and has a very large refugee population.  Much of this neighborhood is made up of the people in poverty, people whom society has deemed an outcast, families that struggle to put food on the table, and children without adult figures in their life.  It consists of people who want/need somebody that is going to come along side of them with no agenda other than to show love to them.

This last Sunday our church family went outside of the church building walls and served the community.  Jennifer and I had the opportunity to be site coordinators at one of the apartment complexes in the neighborhood.  There we would have food (bags of rice, beans, bread, etc.) for families and games and fun for the kids.  We got there early in the morning to begin setting up and unloading the truck.  Within the first 5 minutes, 3 hispanic kids came running up to us asking our names, telling us their names, and asking what we were doing there. We told them that we were there to hang out with them and that later in the morning there would be food and games.   As we began hauling boxes from the truck to the area we were setting up, the kids asked if we would let them help us carry some boxes.  I found it very interesting that these kids just wanted to be by us.  They didn’t know us or if our games and food would be good/fun, they just wanted to hang out with us and help us with anything that they could.  As we were getting closer to having things set up we asked them if they had any friends in the complex that they could invite to come hang out with us.  They ran off and came back about 10 or 15 minutes later with more kids.

One of the things that I enjoyed most about the day was just getting to hang out and spend time with these kids. We played some games, carried boxes, kicked a soccer ball around, learned what school they went to, and got to see a little bit into their lives.  We learned that some of the kids lived with two parents while some of them lived with one.  Some of them had older brothers or sisters that had gotten into drugs.  Some of them didn’t have many friends at school. Some of them loved school.  The thing that caught my attention was that they all wanted to somebody to love on them.

One of the things that I liked about the way that they day was set up was that the members of our church went out there with no agenda other than to give those that needed food some food and hang out and show love to the kids.  I think St. Francis of Assisi said it best, “Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary use words.”

A few pics from the day.

Jesus Creed for Students

I just read that Scot McKnight has combined with Chris Folmsbee and Syler Thomas, both who are youth pastors, to release Jesus Creed for Students.  I am excited to read this book.  I have been following Scot and Chris’s blogs for a while and love the things that they are talking/thinking about within student ministry!

I have read McKight’s “The Blue Parakeet” and Chris’s “A New Kind of Student Ministry” and really enjoyed both books.  They challenged my thinking and have helped me begin to develop my philosophy of ministry.

A Simple Prayer

Our Father,

Lord, keep us from speaking of love while hoarding the gifts you have given us. Make us full of discontent as long as there are brothers and sisters living and dying in hunger. Amen

-Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgorve, and Enuma Okoro in Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals.