four

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the day I married my wife. Marriage has been a learning experience for me--but not in the typical, "What do you mean I can't do whatever I want" kind of learning. It has been a learning of how to forgive, how to ask forgiveness, how to be generous, how to receive generosity, how to negotiate so everyone wins, how to lose so the other can win, how to laugh, how to translate, how to interpret, and how to be silent.

Marking anniversaries leaves me in wonder at how it can seem like you've been with a person your whole life, and yet you still think, "Man, it all goes by so fast." Some days you are just lucky to survive. Other days, the really great days, you find some space to savor it, to lock it in memory.

The next four years, if they are given to us, I hope will bring not only a new awareness of what the reign of God is, but a new depth into which we have entered it together.

small

Being appropriately small was the wisdom passed on to me from John Ortberg (and likely to him from Dallas Willard). I have been thinking about the idea of being appropriately small for a few years. It has always been for me just 'good advice'--what i 'ought' to do. But recently I realized that being appropriately small is hard for insecure people like me. We compensate by trying to be inappropriately big. For some people that looks like fame and flash. For me that has only been a fantasy--thank God! I don't know if I have what it takes to handle that (who does?). Inappropriate bigness for me has usually looked more like a small fish in a smaller pond (or puddle). Some safety, some taste of respect, but still that nagging insecurity (all lies, of course) telling me that I'm a fake--not as smart as everybody thinks, not as kind as everybody assumes, not as selfless as some may consider me to be.

What I've been learning is that being appropriately small has to do with more than humility and not pretending to be more than you are. It also has to do with responsibility to do what you are asked/called to do with what you are--whether it is seemingly insignificant or flashy. Stop worrying about what you aren't, and invest your energies into what you are. Stop pumping energy into living up to imagined expectations and delusions of grandeur, accept what you have been given and live responsibly with that.

in the parable of the talents, the guy with five talents didn't sit there pretending he had ten, dreaming about what he'd do with ten talents. He got to work with what he was given. In the end, his responsibility was rewarded with greater responsibility.

pace

I've become convinced that the pace of life for most of us is damaging to our ability to reflect on and respond responsibly to the world around us. For me, May was a month of great transition--a churning of the waters. I've left my part-time staff position at Jenison Christian and have taken on a new venture in the world of graphic design. This is a very different pace of life for me, and I now find that I must apologize to everyone I expected to show up to every single event I organized as a pastor.

What churches should be doing is helping people learn how to find a healthy pace to their lives. Instead, most of our churches are just adding to the problem--providing one more set of dis-tracting events (albeit with the best of intentions) without training a larger set of skills in life integration, discernment, and how to say 'no' to things that are good. I am not sure we have too many among us who can teach us these skills. How will we learn? We will learn them by figuring it out together; stumbling forward and inviting each other to do and be less of what the busyness culture demands, so that we can become more of what the kingdom invites us to become.