Incompetence Does Not Make Me Exempt

Water skiing sucks. That was my mantra for 6 years of growing up on a lake. My dad really wanted me to learn how to water ski when I was a little girl. If you’ve ever water skied, it feels incredibly awkward as you’re learning.

You have to ‘sit’ in the water in a chair position...while trying to steady these wobbly planks strapped to your feet...the whole time, you’re trying not to topple over into the water sideways... meanwhile your arms feel like they’re being ripped out of their sockets every time you take off...then you pretty much drink the entire lake through your nose each time you fall. As I said, it’s not pleasant. Each summer, I’d give learning to ski a good 3 attempts before I’d start crying and say that I couldn’t do it. That I just wasn’t good at it. I’d give up for the rest of the summer. It took me about 5 summers of this routine to finally learn to water ski.

Do you ever feel that because living missionally isn’t natural to you, you don’t want to do it?

It sure isn’t natural for me. When it comes to living missionally, I have the same mentality as water skiing. It feels awkward. It feels unnatural. I’m friends with our neighbors, but when an opportunity comes to mention the name ‘Jesus,’ everything I think of saying feels really strange, so I choke and end up not saying anything at all. It just doesn’t flow.

I don’t know about you, but it makes a world of difference for me to have permission to not be good at something and have it still be ok. That’s what Nate’s little diagram in this week’s sermon  about ‘unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence,’ did for me.

I realized that just because it’s not easy for me, I’m notexempt from a missional lifestyle. It’s not a natural gift, but that doesn’t mean that I never have to bring up Jesus with my neighbors. It makes sense that if I’ve never done it before, of course I’ll feel awkward, and I’ll have to work on it. God’s intent is ‘comptence,’ but it takes effort and time to get there.

Giving up is not an option. Mentioning Jesus to my neighbors will probably continue to be awkward, but as I do it more and more, I’ll move through those 4 steps of competency, just like I did with water skiing. In fact, even though it’s been a good 15 years since learning to ski, it’s like second nature to me. And I actually love it now.

What about you? Does living missionally come naturally to you?

 Blog entry by:  Sarah Howard

Wake up!

Did you ever just want to scream at someone: your kids, your friends, your spouse, anyone , to say “Wake Up”! Why can’t you see clearly?  That’s what I feel right now. “Why can’t all this wisdom I’ve gained change YOU?!?”

Think back to when you were in your late teens and someone tried to impact some truth on you.  How did you react?  I know what I thought…they’re clueless.  They just don’t get it.  I remember my father’s “Haroldisms”, as we called his words of wisdom.  Back then, I didn’t get it. Today though, they resonate clearly.  I remember a friend’s father repeating over and over, “Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of God.”  At the time, I thought he was annoying and irritating, but now those words are seared in my mind.  I also remember watching a Godly woman demonstrate what a Christian wife and mother should live like.  Qualities that I aspire to today.

In this week’s sermon, Pastor Nate discussed being prepared for judgment day when Jesus returns.   He shared,  “My desire is that you would just wake up.”   Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was just that easy to “wake up”  or that easy to “wake up” the ones we love?

If any of you are parents of a child entering adulthood, you can understand.  You love your children and want the best for them but you aren’t in control when it comes to changing their hearts.  In his sermon Pastor Nate noted how preparedness is not something you can transfer to another person.  Each individual has to make up their own mind.  It comes down to their choice, not yours. 

That’s a tough place to be when you love your children so deeply.  I’m learning through this season in my life that I’m not my children’s savior, Jesus is.  And sometimes God has to rock our kids hard, in order to wake them.  So as a parent, you may need to get out of the way and let your child be woken up. 

Reflecting back over the last 20 years, I realize God didn’t just bring me out of my sleep all at once, but gradually, awakened me.  So while you may just want to scream at someone to “Wake up! Jesus is coming!”   You may just need to quietly continue to plant the seeds.

How can you plant seeds to help others to gradually “wake-up”?

Blog entry by:  Sherry Engel

A Fine Line? Not So Much…

            Just how fine is the line between solid Christian doctrine and a crazy doomsday predictor living in a camper?  Doesn’t the Bible tell us to be ready, and doesn’t it give us some signs to look for?  Shouldn't all good Christians study this with zeal?  

            Predictions of the end of the world have been coming fast and furious over the past several years.  Needless to say, you are reading this because they’ve all been wrong.  Oddly enough, each seems to get more attention, more press, and more followers than the last. Usually mixing in some misconstrued scripture, a little wishful thinking, and a pinch of doomsday fear, the would-be prophets stir up a following and usually manage sell some books.  Humans are naturally eager to know what the future holds, and we love to latch onto anything that gives us a glimpse of things to come.

           This passage in Matthew 24, from which Nate has been teaching,  is often cited as a sort of “road map” for spotting the milestones of the second coming of Jesus.  It includes things like false messiahs, natural disasters, and war.  Anyone who watches the news or reads a newspaper would not be off the mark in thinking that sounds a lot like the world we live in today.  Indeed, it does. With our 24/7 news culture, at least one of those things makes headlines almost every day.  Surely, we're living in the "last days," right?

            The only problem is that none of these phenomena are new.  Even a brief overview of the last two thousand years shows a world history punctuated with the rise of false prophets (leading to many world religions and cults), natural disasters (global cooling, plagues, volcano eruptions), and wars (The Mongol Conquests, the Crusades, World Wars I and II).  Every generation since Christ could have read Matthew 24, looked around at the world, and been justified in thinking the return of Christ was imminent.

            So if Jesus isn't speaking specifically (and cryptically) to Christians of 2013, what do we do with this teaching?  Jesus lays out some pretty specific guidelines.  Stay alert, watch out for false teachers, don’t be lead astray, stay strong and don’t live in fear.  These seem like pretty good guidelines for living, period.  Even if we’re not focusing on the second coming. 

            I must admit, if it's not obvious, that this is one of my least favorite topics of discussion.  The primary reason I don’t like to focus on the “end times” is that people often seem so eager to lose the forest for the trees.  In other words, this topic, more than most, seems to capture the imagination and draw our focus away from the primary objective of reaching people, feeding the poor, caring for the helpless and hopeless, and sharing the love of Jesus with the world.

            I know and agree, “the end is near,” but instead of a myopic focus on a specific prophesy, this truth should spur us into action.  The end is, indeed, near.  Whether it’s the end of the world, or just the end of our time on it, we need to remain focused on doing what we’ve been called to do.  Let’s stop wasting time and resources on counting vowels in Genesis to calculate the date of the rapture, and use our energy on something that will yield fruit; that’s a line of doctrine I can follow.

Blog entry by:   Jeff Hyson

Missing Jesus?

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—“

                                -Paul Laurence Dunbar

These are the first two lines of one of my favorite poems. It speaks to the cultural truth that we like to hide from reality.

It’s second nature to me. I have worn a mask my whole life, one that attempts to make me appear as an individualist, willing to do my own thing no matter what anyone thinks. One that makes me look as if I don’t need other people’s approval.          

                Lies, all bold-faced lies.  I’ve only recently begun facing this truth that I’m a liar.

I desperately care what other people think. I always have. My life is so full of paralyzing fears of relationships that I literally can’t deal with them at times. I second guess everything I say, everything I do, everything I think:

                Did I say the right thing? Is someone going to be offended?

                I should have kept my mouth shut!

                Should I have done something differently? That made me look stupid!

I am, as I see it, socially awkward. My life has been spent attempting to emulate the outgoing, the “cool,” the people who can talk to anyone with confidence. When I couldn’t copy them, I sat in my tiny corner with a mixture of envy and awe toward those front and center, who work their way through relationships with seeming ease.                  

I became a people worshipper.  My entire identity was wrapped up in what other people thought of me. I clung to those who “approved” of me, my friends and family, as my heroes and my idols. When these idols let me down, as fallible humans always will, my identity went crashing down, too.

I was the first point in last Sunday’s sermon  a person embroiled in “an obsessive and destructive pattern of using people to…feel loved, becoming a slave to others’ opinions.” 

I was so busy seeking approval that I didn’t see what God wanted me to see: His plans, His purposes, His sovereignty, His wonder, His deliberate creation of me as I am.

There is such great freedom in taking the mask off, to breathe fully and without fear. To finally realize that I am God’s precious daughter, created as beautiful in His sight, even with what I see as horrible flaws. To be honest enough to reveal the truth that yes, I am a mess who needs to get my priorities straight, but I am not a hopeless mess. To step out in faith to do what I can to repair relationships destroyed in part by my unrealistic expectations of people as my saviors.

When my focus is on God, I have freedom to pursue what He wants for my life without distraction, to face Him and the world without the suffocating restrictions of a mask of lies.

Blog entry by:   Nancy Vasquez