It’s been a long but good day. I woke up at about 5:30 this morning and it’s now 11:20 PM and I am sensing the pillows call.
All-in-all it’s been a solid day. Everything has gone according to plan and on schedule. I love it when a plan comes together.
Here are some thoughts from my first day here.
Moody is a great place. I know I am an alumni, so it is expected that I would feel this way. But it also is worth noting that I wasn’t a big fan of the Institute all the time. In fact, most of my time as a student was spent not liking the place! But today was another story.
As I sat in the massive auditorium of Moody Church I kind of felt the sense that my alma mater wasn’t the great place I had been told it was while a student. I started thinking about it as a dying breed and frankly stuck about 10 years in the past compared to what I see every day. My mind filled with a sense of "Am I really associated with this?"
About half way through the session tonight I discovered that I liked the place afterall. It wasn’t the music, it wasn’t the patting of the back of one alum to another… it was a sense of togetherness for a purpose that drew me to the place in the first place and somehow I felt like coming to Founder’s Week was "checking in" to that togetherness. If the purpose of MBI is to train a generation of church leaders, I have reported for duty.
I have no great plan. As I listened tonight to a fantastic message by Andy Stanley it came to me. I will never stand on that stage and preach to this audience and I am perfectly fine with that. I think at one point in my life I had hoped that my ministry would one day progress to a national stage or some sort of spotlight. It’s not that "the dream" was a bad thing… it’s that I don’t think that is something God will have for me. I don’t want to focus on the future so much that the present doesn’t matter. Right now, it is far more important to me that each day I do the best I can and live to the most glory of Christ that I can.
P.S. I received good news tonight. A student of mine recently came to know Christ. That is very exciting.
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