Category: light force

  • Paying your dues

    DuesThis morning in Sunday school we talked about jobs. And this got me thinking about the idea of "paying your dues." On the one hand, paying your dues and earning what you’ve got makes perfect sense. But in light of both Matthew 20 and my own experience I know that sometimes good stuff is handed to some people for no good reason.

    I am who I am today, and where I am today, largely because I paid my dues while being patient and diligent. The other day I was thinking about my senior year of high school and how during the last weeks of school the newspaper published where each senior was headed off to for college. I remember seeing tiny Moody Bible Institute surrounded by places like UC Berkeley, Penn, Notre Dame, Northwestern, DePaul, Cornell, MIT, Rose-Holman, Columbia, UNC, and of course IU, and Purdue. As my friends saw my declaration and my selected major of youth ministry instead of something "prestigious" like engineering or medicine or journalism. I looked at that list and felt really small. I felt like I was a loser among some great people. Yes, our class was extraordinary academically even though we’ll only ever be remembered as a great athletic class.

    More importantly, I was well aware I was entering a world I didn’t know. The world of "church."

    As I thought back last week, I wondered about that list and really how many of those seniors finished at their schools and how many are as doing what they intended to do back then? It really is pretty remarkable that I am doing now what I set out to do 12 years ago. I am proud of what God has done in fulfilling that punky kids dream.

    I paid my dues in a lot of ways. I took crap jobs and just did what I had to do. Academically, I paid by catching up and competing with Bible Nerds who had done church their whole lives and seemed to know everything about the Bible while I knew very little, to my itty bitty view of the church and even my intended career. I did hard classes, I found a place to fit in, I worked hard to prove myself "worthy" among both my peers and those I worked for and with.

    Then in class today I thought about all the crap I did to get here and it just made me look back on what I have in a whole new way. I know I had to do more than most of my peers. My parents didn’t have a college fund to pave the way. My daddy wasn’t a big shot pastor who could get me a "first job" and I didn’t know anyone. No one was "looking out for me" or making my path easier. I don’t say that to belittle those who did or to take any credit away from God… it’s just that I know that I had to endure those lumps to get somewhere.

    Lumps? Yeah, as I like to joke… being a past (pastor is a shepherding term) has taught me over and over again that sheep bite! But I’ve also endured lumps from family and friends along the way. Most importantly I’ve had to sit through, work around, and scratch my way to the point that if something is easy I wonder "What’s going wrong?"

    Paying my dues, while painful, has made me appreciate the journey. I know I’ve not "arrived" in youth ministry (How do you do that anyway) nor do I think one day people will think highly of me, but I am appreciated, in the end paying my dues has reaped rewards. I’ve got a long way to go, I know some of my "big goals" and I’ve put a lot of those goals in motion… now it’s just more of the same as I’ve always done… pay dues, accept lumps, endure, press on, be diligent, and a fair amount of stubbornness along the way.

    At the end of the day, I just want to be labeled "Good kid, lot of problems… but a good kid."

  • Is this calling you?

    Hilltop_viewLight Force students may remember Erik and Michelle who visited us last July. Well, they are now back home and this is their view of the South Pacific from their backyard.

  • re-run time

    Lf_bug_1Starting to sound like a broken record here, but tonights Light Force was great. The talk was simple, yet solid (I thought anyway) and the "big secret" is that I didn’t get to practice because time crunched me today.

  • What should I do with my life?

    It’s crunch time for our high school seniors. As the financial packages are coming together and the final choices are soon to be made… I am left with this from Jim Elliot. A bright future laid ahead of this young man, he could have done almost anything but he felt God’s call on his life. [A new movie about him and his co-workers]

    Jimelliotquote It took me a long time to really understand this quote. I heard it all the time at Moody. People had it written on their doors, on their notebooks, on and on. I remember hearing it and seeing it and thinking… That’s a little dumb.

    Here is what he said, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

    When you sit back and let that sink in for a time, you start to see the truth in it. Following Christ anywhere is never a "waste." What is paramount above all things is following him. Whether that be into chemical engineering, parenthood, politics, ministry, sports medicine, or whatever. What is paramount is the attitude that it’s Christ’s life and not mine to waste.

    I know there have been many times in the last few years when I’ve wanted to press the "cash out" button and walk away. "What’s stops you?" From an earthly perspective there is still a dream to be chased. From a vertical perspective is the reality that it’s He who "wasted my life" and not me. It’s not my life, I gave it away!

  • connect, connecting, and connected

    Link_aloneunConnected The reality is that for every person who feels connected to a church or to "people like them" there are 10 who aren’t connected. This isn’t the end of the world, but it isn’t all that great either.

    If you’re a student and you’r unConnected than you are a floater. You’ve got plenty of acquantances but are looking for some friends who will really love you for who you are. You’d be cautious about calling yourself lonely because that makes it seem like you are a loser or something. You aren’t a loser, you just are unConnected. The answer is keep trying to make the connection!

    Connect! There is an "aha" moment when someone finally connects with someone they click with. It happens and you aren’t sure how or why… you just know that you feel a sense of relief and you instantly feel like you’ve belonged for a long time.

    For youth workers, this happens on YMX every day. It is exciting because someone realizes that they aren’t alone in their struggles. They find out that geographically they aren’t even that far from one another! Suddenly it dawns on them that while they feel anonymous and ambigious in the universe of youth ministry they can connect.

    Chains Connecting The next step is when you realize that the first connection may have been an accident, but you can do something about connecting some more.

    For a LF student, this isn’t all that easy! Middle school students feel very stuck in their groupings. They tend to fear that if they go outside of their group, even if they made a new link to someone and connected, if they go outside of their group too much they fear that they will be rejected by this. It’s not any worse for a guy as it is for a girl. Here’s the crazy reality though… you can connect your group by being the link!

    Connected Almost every day I’ll talk to someone and say "I know a guy in New York that does _________." Then I’ll see their head turn sideways and you can see them think, "How does a youth dude in tiny Romeo, Michigan know another youth pastor in another state?" It’s because I am connected to a group that doesn’t have geographical boundaries.

    Every group has boundaries. (Study Group Dynamics and your head will spin!) When you have good friends in high school there is a paralizing reality during your senior year when you realize that this group you’ve been connected to forever is falling apart due to geography. One of you is going to State. Another is headed to Alma. Another is going to stay at Macomb. But being and getting connected is not limited to geography.  For me, YMX and it’s predecessors where fantastic at helping me get connected with people who were wired like me. Is it weird that most of these "friends" have never met in the flesh? Sure it is. And an awkward thing is that not every time you meet up with a YMX friend does it turn out the way you want… (Meeting up with Todd and Kim has been the coolest thing in YMX so far!) but it’s better than being unConnected. [About YMXes  vision]

    At the end of the day you are reading this in one of these chairs. Are you unConnected, connected, connecting, or connected? Of course, most of us sit in all of those chairs at the same time… but as I reflect on different areas of my life, I think about those levels of connection.

  • At the Starbucks

    StarbucksI spent most of last night at the Starbucks on Hall Rd since there were a gaggle of high school females at my house. I ended up staying there for about 5 hours. During which time I watched a movie, Omagh, and mostly just chatted online with friends, worked on some stuff for YMX and people watched.

    Omagh On Omagh. This was a town fairly close to where I spent my summer in Fivemiletown, Northern Ireland. We went there on our day off, and I knew that it had a severe bombing. I had no idea that this is a lot like visiting the WTC area of New York. On October 15th, 1998 a bomb went off in the central shopping area of Omagh while children were going to and from school, people shopping, on and on. It was eery to see places and realize that I was there. I don’t know if the film was shot in the exact location, but it if was I stood right there, and went in that shop where the bomb went off.

    On people watching. This was a big eye opener for me. When we were in Fivemiletown we marveled at the way students congregated in key areas. As we tried to draw a parallel to this in the States the only thing we could come up with was football and basketball games. Now I know another place… Starbucks. For hours and hours tons of high school students filtered in, hung out, and filtered out. I have to look into that more. Wow. But more than that, there were all sorts of characters to watch. People like me on laptops. Ladies reading books about mystery. Young workers collecting checks. First dates. Business meetings. Old friends spotting each other over mochas. The occasional panhandler. And swarms of people either just going to or just finishing a movie. It is weird that I can concentrate so well among the noise of those places, but I can get more done in a few hours there than I can in an entire day in my office.

  • 3Story Life

    3storybannerI’m in the process of reworking 3Story for Students into a 6 session small group curriculum for adults. This isn’t a major re-write or anything, I would call it more appropriately "re-arranging" the curriculum to suit our needs.

    3Story has been slowly rolling out here at Romeo. I did the adult leader training last fall with what has become our core group of small group leaders. Also, a group of high school girls is working through it in their bible study. My goal is to see 100 Romeo people go through the training in 2006. Re-arranging the curriculum for adults is obviously a massive part of that.

  • good times for LF and YMX

    Lf_bug It was a good day for both things that I am a part of and care about. Tonight’s LF was pretty solid. A bit weird since there were some middle schoolers missing with a meeting at the schools, and there was a smell of "winter duldroms" since students were well, down. Weird, but OK and part of the school year cycle.

    Ymx_alt_nostroke It’s also been a good week for YMX. We’re up to 172 members… pretty good for a newbie site. We’ve had a lot of hits and a lot of activity. I can’t get over nearly 26,000 posts in the forums. 26,000? Holy crap that is a lot of action. We also settled on a new logo and I am excited about a full run of meet-ups coming along.

  • Inner City Impact: One of the best

    IciWay back before Inner City work was hip, Bill Dillon started ministering to kids in the Inner city of Chicago. Now, 25+ years later, Bill’s vision of real ministry doing real discipleship is still plugging away one life at a time.

    I have grown to love this simple yet profound ministry. Their methods have never been cutting edge, but they just get the job done. For the past two years I’ve enjoyed getting to know this ministry as we’ve taken our group there for short term trips over Spring Break… and I just can’t get enough. (We don’t know for sure if it is going to work out in 06, more on that later.)

    But my point is that longitudinal simple ministry will always get the job done better and more effectively than a flash in the pan. Also, some people want to know "Are short term trips valuable to host ministries?" Absolutely. If a company is wise, they will integrate these short-termers into their long term goals. Mission agencies that make a business out of short term trips are well, short-sided.

    So… check out Inner City Impact.

  • “Am I Cursed?”

    Dr_philEarlier this week in Light Force we looked at Luke 8 and discussed demon possession.

    The very next day, Dr. Phil talked about the same topic on his show. [See show] I tuned in during the early part of the show and actually agreed with a a lot of what he said. Primarily, I agree with him that there really is an evil force in the world and that it is possible that people can be possessed by demons. I ever respected his keeping the integrity of the shows purpose and attempting to keep a fairly religious topic as simple as possible. Even though I don’t like Dr. Phil overall and wouldn’t recommend watching him all the time, I didn’t mind this episode.