Posted on

The Roller Coaster

There are two types of people in this world. One is the kind that ride hands up, mouth open as their legs are suspended below them as the G forces compress their chest. Then there are those who brave the track tightly embracing the harness, white knuckled hoping the 2 minute and 20 seconds of terror-filled joy ends sooner rather than later. (And I guess, a third, like my wife, who is wise enough not to ride roller coasters at all.)

But for the sake of this post, let’s just consider the two. The truth is both will get on and off the same ride. Both individuals will experience the same climbs, drops, twists, turns, and loops. So what drives one person pull the harness done and put their hands up? In a word, fear. Or better said a lack of it. There is a courageous confidence that the whipping wild ride will end in the success of safety. While the both riders start with the same knowledge that the train of carts will circle right back to where it started, one sits down with a confidence of the outcome.

Now, I get I am generalizing individuals on how they ride amusement park rides, but there is a lesson in it for us. How do you harness into this wild ride called life. It is filled with ups, downs, twists, turns, and the occasional loopy-loop. Are you screaming with joy or shrilling with fear? What I have learned is that fear and joy cannot co-exist. Fear is accosts our emotions and assaults our joy. Fear keeps us from choosing the joy-filled and joyful moments of life.

Now fear is useful. It tells us that there is danger when legitimized. Fear says “hey, that bear is probably not friendly.” Yet, most ofter fear is a foe and not a friend. Fear is slithering snake of a liar whispering make believe lies into our thoughts. Lies like “it will be good for you” or “no one really loves you” or “you will never be successful”. The lies of fear cause us to clinch the hand bars of the Screamin’ Demon and go ghostly white with prayer in hopes that you just get off alive. And in the process miss every joy filled thrill life brings you.

I agree, this metaphor has gone a little too far. Yet, truth is truth. Fear is a liar, but not a thief. You see fear cannot steal your joy, it is surrendered. The apostle Paul tells us to take every thought captive in one letter and in another challenges the readers to “think on these things” whatever is pure, lovely, JOYFILLED. He never says to park your thinker on fear and stay here. No, every thought he presses on us to think stands in opposition to fear.

My life has had some ups and down (guess I wasn’t done with the metaphor) and I have had some seasons and stretches of life that fear has been a perpetual companion. Yet, I am learning that if I want to have joy, I cannot invite in fear. So when fear comes knocking, I choose to not let it in. I focus on what is true, what is lovely, what is right.

In a season where JOY will be trumpeted, choose joy.

Posted on

Why We Need Each Other

Maybe you don’t think you do. Maybe you are a renegade, a cowboy or cowgirl, who believes that the life of a loner is the way. It is just not true. Oh, I have wished at times it was. I have bought the lie that life is easier as a solo flight without the entanglements of other people. And sure, you can survive this way, but is it really living?

Let me outline my growing up. I learned early on how to pack my relational parachute. As a kid our life seemed always in transit. My dad moved us more times than I can count. I am sure each one was well intentioned to better our situation, but with each move came a new set of goodbyes and a fresh introduction of hellos. At some point after enough times, whatever that number became, I learned that with each hello came a pending goodbye. So in an effort to soften the blow of the adios, came a distancing from the start. 

Healthy? No. A coping mechanism? Of course. 

Why this unpacking of my childhood transience? To simply say this, what I learned in the capacity to disconnect was my great need for connection. In learning that relationships were temporary and transactional, I realized that what my soul longed for was something more than an exchange system of pleasantries and something authentic and real. What was fostered by my moves is not built into our culture through digital connections. Because we have spent months “following” someone we think we know them. In some way, we know about them. We know what they eat, read, and where they go. Yet, our soul has a longing to be really known. 

Maybe it is why we fly deeper into the fly-paper of social media. It is a heart cry to be seen and known without all the risk of loss. To be known by someone means taking a risk that along the way you get hurt. Vulnerability is the admission price of a real relationship. In order to ride the ride of life, we have to buy a ticket into the gate of being fully known. 

It is why I think the Lord left Adam and Eve without clothing. Sure it may have sparked the libido to populate the planet, but I think it was because in that first moment as the imago dei of God they were fully seen by each other. It was a moment of no shame, no hiding. Now I am not advocating for a nudist colony. My body is less than the perfection of the first man. I am ringing the bell for us to be fully seen by those God has put in close proximity to us. 

Even as I confidently write these words, I swallow hard in my throat, because for me it means I take off that emotional parachute with a quick rip cord to bail me out of moments of intimacy. It means jumping out of the plane without it. Okay, so maybe the metaphor went too far, but you get what I am saying. It is risky. 

Why do I keep coming back to this topic in my writing? It is simple, I fight this everyday of my life. I fight the presentation of perfection. Even in being flawed is often carefully crafted to make me look more human. And what the heart beats and cries out for is that space to just be Jeff. In a handful of spaces, I have found that freedom. I have found that in my wife and a few close friends. I have found that freedom that I am loved and cared for just as I am without pretense or need to guard my heart. In that is a small reflection of that first garden moment where the created beings of Adam and Eve lived without shame or hiding. They found communion and community with God and each other. Why do we need each other? It is simple, you cannot be fully authentic without the context of community. Sure you can be you, who you are, but that who was meant to be embraced, loved, cared for within the setting of others. 

So here is my best effort to put my parachute away. Here is me laying down my exit strategy from the relationships of my life. Because we were created for community. We were built for connections that are real and deep and meaningful. 

Posted on

4 Things Church Planting Has Taught Me (so far)

So we are 4 weeks in to this experience called The Collectives Church. And to be honest it has been a wild ride. God has been incredibly faithful in so many ways. As we continue to press forward, here is what I have learned so far.

  1. God is faithful in unexpected ways.

We have seen God do what he would say he would do. Yet, it has not looked how I expected it to look. God has faithfully provided the resources, the people, the place. Each one of those resources came in the most unlikely of ways. It as if He is pressing not just on my trust that He will do what he says, but teaching me to trust the process of how he will do what he has promised. I think we try to script the role of God in our life and circumstances. We try to guide him in doing what he said he would do just in the way we are most comfortable with him doing it. God looks at us and says “hold my Communion juice”. Then shows up in a way that is completely unexpected.

2. People are the greatest resource.

I cognitively knew this. I have experience this in leadership before. Yet, this has been a reminder of how valueable God’s people are. We have been given thousands of dollars and that has helped immensely (if you’d like to give you can here), but the greatest capital in the Kingdom of God is his people. Are team has faithfully served and sweated, quite literally as the air conditioning went out the last two weeks. The continue to serve and give of themselves. The continue to pour themselves out as an offering not just for our house, but for the Lord. We would have never reached this point without them.

Church is not an organization or a building. The Church is the people who are serving well, loving well, and glorifying King Jesus. We did more than plant a church, we believe we are planting people who will grow into leaders of the church.

3. People are hurting, but God is faithful.

This seems like a downer, but this is a lesson we are learning and one we knew all along. It is one of the reasons we pressed to start The Collectives to begin with. We live in a busted and broken world that has taken its full shots at individuals. A lot of people walk around wounded. A lot of people carry years of hurt with them.

While this is true, the reality is the Lord is still in the business of healing hurting hearts and mending broken lives. We are believing for miracles.

4. We believe in this generation.

If you join us on Sunday night, our stage is filled with twenty-somethings. At the door will be young adults and teens smiling and offering you coffee and a snack. If you linger around after, you will see young adults scatter like ants to tear down and reset the space we use. With all the berating of this generation, we have watched them step up and step into leadership. We have watched them fill the rows and lift their hands and hearts in worship. We have seen them respond to the call to lead.

It is as if they were just waiting for someone to ask them to lead.

Don’t mistake it, I realize we are really early on in this process and there will be more lessons to be learned. Yet, I am so glad we were courageous enough to step into where God has called us. Lives are changed, families are impacted, and individuals entire trajectories are being established as we keep reaching the lost, raising disciples, and releasing them into their purposes.

Go Be The Collectives!

Posted on

In the Silence

As the clippers zipped across the salt ‘n cumin-colored hair that covers my head, she said, “they are well-meaning. They do not know what to say. They think they are being helpful, but it is not what I need.” 

The “they” she was referring to were church people. The occasion was grief. 

My grieving barber was saying that she wanted someone to sit in silence with her. Sit in the quiet. Sit ready to listen when she is ready to talk. Sit with the laughter, anger, and simultaneous tears of sadness and joy wrapped around a memory. What needs to be said is nothing. 

Silence and Stillness

As people of faith, we want to say the perfect thing that will bring comfort and peace. So we carefully craft sentiments that belong on Hallmark cards and in the scripts of Hallmark movies. But, unfortunately, while well-meaning, these kind and trite sentiments tend to express the complete lack of understanding of the moment and what is needed most: silence and stillness. 

Grief, while natural, is complex and complicated. It is an emotion most have little experience with until it is our turn to walk down the pathway of loss. Loss is hard. It can be complicated by very well-meaning people with a lack of understanding who say they understand. What is needed more than awkward conversation during the journey of grief is a simple posture of silence and presence. If you are like me, you dislike the silence. 

So coupled with my fresh haircut are my AirPods putting music into my ears and brain to cover the click of the keyboard and quiet the noisy part of my brain to let the creative section craft words for your reading. For me and a lot like me, silence is more foe than friend. Silence is the enemy. 

Peace in Silence

So how do we learn to make peace with the silence?

In the less than quiet reflection of this moment comes flooding the posture Jesus so often took. The divine human who walked this earth for 33 years would often slip away into the silence. The bible tells us Jesus would go to a “lonely place” to pray. Jesus, alone, in the quiet, by himself would pray, maybe shed tears of joy and grief, in the silence of the night. 

Richard Foster, the famed writer on spiritual disciplines, writes this: 

“Silence frees us from the need to control others. One reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that it makes us feel so helpless.” 

We hate helplessness. Yet, sometimes the most significant help to those we are walking within this life and in our very own walk with Jesus is to be silent. Maybe the best thing is to quiet our words, quiet our minds, and quiet our lives. Maybe in the stillness of the silence, we begin to hear the other that we sit with. Maybe in the silence, we start to listen to the Spirit whispering wisdom that the noise of our lives has blocked out. 

Please understand, silence is not a discipline I am good at or even practice regularly. I am most comfortable in the noise. Yet, over time of sitting with those grieving and learning to listen to the Spirit, silence is the most significant attribute I can bring to the conversation. Quite possibly, this is why the psalmist penned those famous words: “Be still and know that I am God.” Maybe the songwriter knew that we had to quit making all the noise for us to see and hear God. 

Step into the discomfort and try to sit in the silence. Just see if in the quiet you see and hear things you’ve never heard before.