Close your eyes

This morning in my reading through the One Year Bible, this one verse stuck out to me.

2 Corinthians 5:7 says "We live by faith, not by sight."

Wow, so much packed into that little sentence. For me this is a constant tension in my life. Really up until a few years ago almost all of my decisions and my actions were based on what I could see. In other words, if I didn't know how it was going to work out, I probably wasn't going to do it. But then there was church planting. Since I began this process I've learned about moving and acting in the midst of uncertainty. From moving to surviving financially to leading down a path I've never been - all of it has been by faith. And God has proven himself so faithful during this time. He has provided for us when we didn't know how it would happen. He has blessed us for taking steps of faith where we didn't have clarity.

But the tension for me remains. Almost every day as a pastor I'm faced with what I can see - the very real circumstances of people's lives. There are marriages that are struggling, people healing through an abusive past, surgeries, and all kinds of hurt and pain. I'm faced with statistics, with attendance numbers, and with budgets. I'm faced with a growing church and growing kids ministry that doesn't have the volunteers to keep up. There are facts and figures and dates and schedules that start to dominate my thinking.

It would be very easy for me to allow what I can see to consume me, to overwhelm me, and to ultimately paralyze me. But we can't live that way. We won't live that way. We, as the people of God, we live by faith not by sight. The unseen drives us and compels us to keep going and to keep believing a different future is possible even when all that we can see now tells a different story.

Don't let your sight overcome your vision.

Sometimes I think you and I would do better if we closed our eyes every now and then. Because what we can see often keeps us from taking steps of faith. We lose hope. We lose our vision.

Your marriage doesn't have to be this way. Your finances can turn around. You can heal through this struggle. There is hope for you. When we stop living by sight and start living by faith our vision outgrows our sight. We start to believe things that right now seem impossible.

So whatever is holding you back today from doing what you know God has called you to do - close your eyes to it. Let the vision in your heart override what can be seen, and may your faith drive you forward into the uncertainty of the future.

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Clean Water

Scott Harrison is changing the world. His organization Charity:Water provides clean, safe drinking water to some of the most unreached people groups in the world. Great ideas like this one don't just happen. Someone has a wild dream, then decides to do something about it. Most people never get to the second half of that - the doing part. Too many of us stop short because of the cost, the criticism, or the difficulty. I bet the people of this village are glad that Scott was willing to pursue the vision he had to change the world. I bet they are glad that he didn't listen to the naysayers, to the people who said it couldn't be done. I bet they are glad he didn't give up.

We promised we'd be back. from charity: water on Vimeo.

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Week 2

Another amazing morning at Story Church. I seriously can't believe I get to do this. We did a pretty bold thing this week. In only our 2nd week as a church, we decided to call an audible this week and divert from our series "GROW" and tackle head on the suffering we are seeing in Haiti. I spent all week preparing for GROW part 2, but by Friday night I became convinced that we couldn't ignore what was happening in the world. I couldn't say "Hey, let's pray about Haiti, let's take a special offering, ok now back to doing our thing." So instead we talked about suffering and how we understand that in a world where God is supposed to be in control.

We acknowledged the question many of us were asking - "Where is God?" In the end, Scripture is so clear that God is with the suffering. He's on the side of the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, and the have-nots. As a church planter, I think I will look back to this week as a pivotal one for us. It was a week where we took a bit of a risk in order to make a pretty serious statement about our values and our vision as a church. Not many church plants I know have started by changing their plans in week two and addressing an issue like suffering. And no church I know has given away 100% of their offering like we did this week. I'm so proud of our church, the way they stepped up, caught a vision for proclaiming God's heart for the world, and responded with radical generosity. This day will stay with us for a long time.

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Plans vs. Vision

"Plans change, vision stays the same." I listened recently to another Andy Stanley leadership podcast that hit me at just the right time. I asked on twitter last week for people to be praying for me as I had some pretty big decisions to make. I feel like God really answered many of those prayers by allowing me to hear this particular podcast. In it, Andy talks about how many of us fail to realize that our particular vision is not the same as our particular plan. I know for me this church planting adventure that I am on is one where my plans and the vision God has given me sometimes get confused. I think this is common for many of us. Maybe your vision is about a particular ministry, or about your business, or even a particular vision for your family. Our plans become so important to us. After all, we pray about them, we align our finances around them, we follow our plan to the greatest detail. But which is more important - the plan (how I will accomplish the vision), or the vision itself? Sometimes we have to be willing to be flexible with our plans. Plans change, vision stays the same.

In my context my church planting plan has had some significant changes along the way. The vision has continued to stay the same. Our vision is to plant a life-giving church that encourages people to embrace the story they were meant to live. It's a vision that calls people out of boredom and into the life God intended for them. And yet my plan has often gotten confused with that vision. Originally my plan was that this would happen primarily in downtown Durham. When God began pointing me closer to the Grove Park area, I struggled with that. How could we change our focus like that? Oh yeah - downtown isn't the vision, a life-giving church is the vision. More recently I've wrestled with a new change of plans. For a year I've been planning on launching Story Church on September 13, 2009. And yet recently, I've come to terms with the fact that we aren't ready to launch. At first this was a devastating reality for me. How can I change my launch date?? Oh yeah, September 13 isn't the vision - a healthy, life-giving church is the vision. September 13 is a plan. And it can change without affecting the vision.

How about you? What's the vision you have for your life, your career, your family, your marriage? Is that vision married to a particular plan, or is the plan flexible? If we don't learn to flex the plan, our vision can die with a bad plan. Good vision thrives at the right time with the right plan - but it's not the same as our plan. We die for vision, but not for our plans.

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Visioneering

I'm reading Andy Stanley's great book Visioneering right now and it is really hitting me at just the right time. As we get further along in this church planting adventure, and closer to our launch, I feel more and more inadequate and less and less prepared. I just thought I'd post a few of my favorite nuggets from the first few chapters so far and let you think about them.

"Vision is always accompanied by strong emotion. And the clearer the vision, the stronger the emotion" (10).

"God ordained visions are always too big for us to handle" (42).

"You are not responsible for figuring out how to pull off God's vision for your life. You are responsible to do what you know to do, what you can do. And then you must wait" (56-57).

"If it is just a good idea, you have to make it happen. When God gives you a vision, there's a sense in which you stand back and watch it happen" (57).

"I think it is safe to assume that most Christians are not attempting anything that requires God's intervention" (71).

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