Mondays are for called in sick today ramblings…

Having spent the last week travelling to Indiana, looking at many many houses and then travelling back for an extremely long day yesterday my body has given out on me. I just hurt. But, sitting at home with the house quiet does create a nice blogging environment.

Hotdogs and Glowsticks at Worship

Here is a video shot from my cellphone (obviously poor quality) from the Fall Festival we hosted on the Village Green last night. It was a great night, hotdogs, hamburgers, worship, eucharist, glow sticks, a concert, people coming out onto their balconies to see what was happening, a sermon rooted to a Rolling Stones song, dogs, kids playing Red Rover.. during the service, crying babies, people just walking by stopping to see what was going on, and lots of beautiful fellowship. It was a great night.

I am ready for my HGTV Show

House hunting is really stressful. You have to really trust your gut instinct and initial impressions to guide you. After seeing house after house you can begin to talk yourself into different houses because you are weary and your sense is to just choose and compromise. It is also hard to emotionally detach yourself from the process. Otherwise you can end up making bad decisions. Regardless it is only a sign of immense blessing and privilege that we could fly across the country and shop for a house. I found myself simply giving praise to God that we weren’t concerned about whether or not we would have a place for our children to grow up, but instead which house we would buy. We are so blessed.

I also kept picturing us as part of an HGTV show like House Hunters. I was guessing which three would we have narrowed it down to, how our steel worker realtor (who is awesome and we love) would have come across on tv and which house the audience would have been rooting for. I think it is interesting to sometimes turn stressful situations of our lives into gameshows. We should do this more often.

Mic Jagger, Theologian

Last night in my sermon I interjected a little gameshow action as well. We played a little name that tune. The point was to get us to the Rolling Stone song, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. I have always liked this song. But last night I was comparing the chorus of this song to Jesus parable of the Landowner and the Workers. I think that we all spend our lives searching for what we want. We get what we want sometimes and it is as good or better than we thought. We get it sometimes and find out it wasn’t anything like we thought it would be. We often times don’t get it at all and that can be good or bad. Regardless. God works to give us what we need, not what we want.

It like Mic says, “But if you try sometimes, yeah, you just might find you get what you need.”

The Kingdom of God is very much like that. Even as we enter into a relationship with God and begin to discover and serve in his kingdom we are still battling what we want verses what we need. We have a hard time, even as disciples of Christ, putting aside our wills and finding the Father’s. This is very hard in a kingdom where nothing is as you expect and we are all made equal by our unworthiness and God’s mercy. We will all find much more joy and contentment when we learn to trust in God to provide what need more than we spend time searching for what we want. The more we spend trusting God, the more what we need actually becomes what we want anyways.

Here is some Stones to get you started this week.