We prayed over our kids on Sunday since Monday was their first day of school, at least for most of them. Chad read this passage from Carry on Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton that I wanted to add here. It’s from a mother to her son, but it fits for more than that. It’s beautiful.

“I think that God puts people in our lives as gifts to us. The children in your class this year, they are some of God’s gifts to you. So please treat each one like a gift from God. Every single one. Baby, if you see a child being left out, or hurt, or teased, part of your heart will hurt a little. Your daddy and I want you to trust that heartache. Your whole life, we want you to notice and trust your heartache. That heartache is called compassion and it is God’s signal to you to do something. It is God saying Wake up! One of my babies is hurting! Do something to help! Whenever you feel compassion, be thrilled! It means God is speaking to you and that is magic. It means he trusts you and needs you. Sometimes the magic of compassion will make you step into the middle of a bad situation right away. Compassion might lead you to tell a teaser to stop it and then ask the teased kid to play. You might invite a left out kid to sit next to you at lunch. You might choose a kid for your team first who usually gets chosen last. These things will be hard to do, but you can do hard things. Sometimes you will feel compassion but you won’t step in right away. That’s okay too. You might choose instead to tell your teacher and then to tell us. We are on your team –We are on your whole class’s team. Asking for help for someone who is hurting is not tattling; it is doing the right thing. If someone in your class needs help, please tell me, baby. We will make a plan to help together. When God speaks to you by making your heart hurt for another, by giving you compassion, just do something. Please do not ignore God whispering to you. We do not care if you are the smartest or fastest or coolest or funniest. There will be lots of contests at school and we don’t care if you win a single one of them. We don’t care if you get straight As. We don’t care if the girls think you’re cute or whether you’re picked first or last for kickball at recess. We don’t care if you are your teachers’s favorite or not. We don’t care if you have the best clothes or most trading cards or coolest gadgets. We just don’t care. We don’t send you to school to become the best at anything at all. We already love you as much as we possibly could. You do not have to earn our love or pride and you can’t lose it. That’s done. We send you to school to practice being brave and kind. Kind people are brave people. Brave is not something you should wait to feel. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd. Trust me baby, it is. It is more important. Don’t try to be the best this year, honey, just be grateful and kind and brave. That’s all you ever need to be. Take care of those classmates of yours, and your teacher too. You belong to each other. You are one lucky boy with all of these new gifts to unwrap this year. I love you so much that my heart might explode. Enjoy and cherish your gifts. And thank you for being my favorite gift of all time.”

The Youtube video we watched was of Grave VanderWaal during the live show on America’s Got Talent. And then we enjoyed this wonderful message. What a beautiful Sunday.

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With school fast approaching and summer vacation taking its last breaths, I wanted to reach out to lay out our fall schedule at the Bridge. We’ve all been away, missing each other, I’m anxious to re-connect.

This Sunday, I’ll share a message that has been sitting on my shoulders for weeks, like an animal, waiting for the right time to pounce. It’s taken from 2 parallel passages in Matthew (20:29-34) and Mark (10:46-52). Erwin McManus says, “We set the boundaries of our own existence,” and we’ll dive into a conversation on the many ways in which that is true and why. It’s a perfect message for our current season of new beginnings and soaring expectations. I can’t wait to dream big together, with each other and the God who continues to ask us, “What do you want me to do for you?”

The following Sunday (and the entire month of September), we’ll be studying the 2nd letter Paul wrote to Timothy. On the 11th, as we discuss Truth and faithfulness in the letter, we’ll celebrate this kind of beautiful faithfulness as we baptize Scott Kneasel. And, as we always do, we’ll eat a meal together afterwards.

October & November hold a very different journey for us. (Very different because the only book we’ve studied, so far, is the Bible – and we will continue to bring the Scriptures to all of our conversations, of course) We will study the 5 Love Languages, and Angel and I will co-teach. If you’ve ever had a conversation of any length with me, you’ve heard me refer to this book. It’s completely life-changing, so we’ll change our lives together. This requires small group discussion, so we’ll begin 2 mid-week groups to work out the concepts and how to apply them to our lives and relationships.

It’s an exciting time for our community – there is no question God has been leading us on this journey, I can’t wait to experience what He has planned for us in these next few months.

Our next steps begin Sunday. I’ll see you then.

Love. Peace.

chad.

Thank you Kelly Ohlin for bring us the message Sunday. Be ready to look at scripture as Kelly takes us on a journey about who Jesus is and is he who he says he is.

What a privilege to hear you speak! Thank you Don Kelly for bringing us the message this morning. For teaching us that we were made to soar and we are made for no less. This is the link to the Marshmallow Video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX_oy9614HQ

My overachieving friend works at a library. She also leads a ministry at a correctional facility. These 2 places/missions are very different until they’re not, and it’s in that space, where the purpose of each is exactly the same, that they can hold hands. The library has books to get rid of, and the correctional facility needs books for the residents. Perfect match, right? Of course, so my friend with the giant heart asks if, instead of putting the books in the garbage, she put them in her car. The right answer is “Yes,” but that’s not the truth. The truth is that the library says, “No.” As I heard this story, my ears burned and my head hurt. I was outraged, and I was happy to be swaddled in my rage. I already know that organizations get so much wrong, that structures fail so often, and it’s easy to deal with my preconceptions.
But this story isn’t over, it takes 2 unexpected turns (well, 1 sort of unexpected, and 1 completely shocking) before it ends and the men have the books.
First, the sort of unexpected. The library’s reason for their ‘No,’ is that the books “weren’t good enough for the men.”
Sort of unexpected, but not unexpected at all, if you stop to consider that answer. How often do we not act/say/give because it’s not good enough, because we’re not good enough? And those things remain undone, words remain unsaid. There’s a story in the Scriptures where there are thousands of people, and nothing to eat. No one knows what to do about that, except for Jesus, because no one has enough for this enormous task. However, there’s a boy who doesn’t understand how the world works, who doesn’t understand reality, who is too young and dumb to really be helpful. This hopelessly naive boy brings 5 small loaves and 2 fish and offers it to them.  Jesus takes them and feeds everyone (!!) and has leftovers (!!!!!!).
How about instead of deciding what is and isn’t good enough, if we just take what we have and offer it up and let Jesus turn it into something wonderful and amazing? How about that? How about instead of deciding if we’re good enough, we just push all we are into the middle of the table and see what happens? Maybe, after Jesus gets His hands on them, our small loaves and fishes and tattered paperbacks will be exactly what the crowd needs.

Moving on.
This excuse is transparent and small, right? Just words. Only the library administration wasn’t finished, content to just let my friend walk away dejected. She said, “They’re not good enough, how about if we get some new books and give them, instead?”
Shocking, right? Like I was saying earlier, sometimes organizations and structures succeed, give so much more than an individual could…
I have a box on my porch that we intend to take to the Blue Mountain thrift store. We haven’t taken it yet, because every time I look at it, it looks more and more like garbage. Maybe I shouldn’t only give my junk, the things I don’t like, the leftovers. Maybe I should give from the top, the first, the best. Maybe I should give you the first bite, right from the middle, instead of the crusts, the gristle, what I leave when I’m too full. Probably. Absolutely.
Now, I don’t know if actions/words/things are or aren’t good enough, are or aren’t garbage. I don’t know if I should destroy all organizations and structures in fiery explosions (Fight Club style) or just annihilate my preconceptions.
The point is that I want to scream from the mountaintops how much I love this library administrator, their books, and especially my friend’s heart.
(One more thing: This story ends not with new donated books, but with the library paying my friend to take them there. Seriously! Ha!)

My car was inspected two weeks ago. It’s an older car, and inevitably needs some work, which we always figure as being our ‘car payment,’ and it hurts much less that way. This was no different – that beautiful Ford Focus needed some engine mounts and exhaust work and small nickels and dimes, which gathered into fifties and hundreds. Then, 2 days later, I changed the battery (all by myself!!!) after it folded its arms and refused to take me home from church, pouting like a petulant child.
And now it’s perfect, again.
Yesterday, Angel handed me the garage receipts I had brought inside, for the files, and said, “Put these in your car.”
This is not unusual, it’s our standard practice – to keep them in our glove compartments for years and years. One that neither of us had ever questioned. Until yesterday.
I said, “I know we keep them there. But I brought them in, on purpose.”
“Well, put them back in.”
“Why?”
“That’s where we keep them.”
“I know, but why?”
This, very quickly, and before I could notice, descended into, “Well, then, don’t. I don’t care what you do.”
I didn’t think I deserved an “I don’t care what you do,” as I have always been the kind of person that asks 3 too many ‘why’s,’ of everyone and everything, especially my lovely wife (which may be exactly why I did deserve it). But when I do ask, no matter where I ask, I often get the same answer, “because that’s how we’ve always done things.”
And, in the spiritual life, that can be so dangerous and the enemy of actual growth.
Richard Rohr writes, “We keep praying that our illusions will fall away. God erodes them from many sides, hoping they will fall. But we often remain trapped in what we call normalcy–“the way things are.” Life then revolves around problem-solving, fixing, explaining, and taking sides with winners and losers. It can be a pretty circular and even nonsensical existence.
To get out of this unending cycle, we have to allow ourselves to be drawn into sacred space, into liminality. All transformation takes place here. We have to allow ourselves to be drawn out of “business as usual” and remain patiently on the “threshold” (limen, in Latin) where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown. There alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence. That’s a good space where genuine newness can begin. Get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible. It’s the realm where God can best get at us because our false certitudes are finally out of the way. This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy.”
This normalcy, this business-as-usual, has, sadly, been the golden calf of religion. We take a practice, tradition, ritual, and we siphon any meaning out of it until it is just motions, cutting on the dotted line, just tracing our lives over the lines already there without any thought as to meaning or purpose. Without a why.
In the Scriptures, God says, “I want you to show love, not offer sacrifices. I want you to know me, more than I want burnt offerings.” (Hos. 6:6) This is wildly unexpected because, in the Old Testament, sacrifices and burnt offering were commanded, the way to come closer to God. But God has always wanted our hearts, not merely our routines. We have replaced sacrifices and burnt offering with church attendance and liturgy.
Being a part of a faith community that is created out of God’s word, calling, and the Cleona dust, independent of any denominations, we are also independent of any ‘because that’s the way we’ve always done it’ reasoning.
We can engage in the Lord’s Table and Baptism, because stripped of their status as requirements, we are able to discover them anew.
Today, we have been invited to fast, for as long as we desire. We have been invited to replace our food with our devotion – our fast as a “bodily expression of prayer.” This fast is nothing we ‘have to’ do. Instead, we are free to bring all of us (our bodies, souls, minds, spirits) before our Creator, to share all of us with the One who made all of us, to enter this sacred ‘luminal space’ (as Rohr calls it) where God can tear down the old world we’ve constructed and reveal a bigger one.
If I am honest, I am not yet enjoying it. Maybe it’s not supposed to be enjoyable. Tearing down the walls we’ve built hardly ever is. Transformation hardly ever is. But it’s always worth it.