Perspective Shift. Pangaea Style.

The other day, Amanda and I stepped out of our apartment door and into a beautiful fall Kansas City Sunday morning. We descended the stairs when I saw my car, parked on the street in its usual spot with the trunk flung wide open. "Amanda, did you get something out of the car last night?" Her answer was an expected "no" and as we got to the car, everything inside was thrown around and a complete mess. Pens and papers were everywhere, small pieces of car parts were strewn about. Somebody broke in and tried to steal my stuff. I only had one thing in my car that I actually cared about...a board game, The Settlers of Catan. Praise God, they didn't swipe it! The only other thing missing was a thank you card addressed to Brandon Roth. I had forgotten to mail this card to him, thanking him for the hand engraved baseball bat he gave us for our wedding that reads, "Kenny + Amanda." That was August 7, 2011. A little late on the thank you card. Now he'll never get it. I imagine he'll never care.

I whooped and hollered to my wife, laughing about "those suckers" who didn't get anything from me. I told them off audibly, as if they were still in earshot, and laughed that they wasted time on my car...those freakin' morons.

As the day went on, I constantly thought of these unsuccessful thieves. They didn't get what they were looking for. They live a life of thieving and robbery, which is no real life at all. They apparently might need money for bills, food, etc. Maybe they only need it for recreation-but hey, everyone needs a little rec time! What would I have done if I would have walked out and caught them? Chased them. Cussed at them. Challenged them to a fight that I know I wouldn't win. Been pissed off.

As I thought of these guys (why do I automatically think these robbers were guys? I'm such a sexist), I realized just how attached I am to a world that promises joy, fulfillment, happiness, love, and satisfaction, yet rarely delivers. What would I have lost had I lost anything? A car (if they were REAL thieves), a wallet, some cash, an ipod, a picture of Amanda. It's all just stuff. But my immediate attitude was an attitude of hatred toward them and joy that they didn't "get the best of me." That sucks.

I began to think of how different it would have been if, when they broke into my car, they found a note that said,
"Hey fellas, please don't steal from me. If you need anything though, here's my number: 816-721-1715. Or better yet, I'm in apartment #4104. Come on up!"

I try to imagine how Jesus would have responded to these guys. To a tax collector, he invites himself over for dinner. To a prostitute, he looks her in the eye. To Judas, a backstabbing, lying, thieving sun of a gun, he invests years of his own life, pouring into him.

I'm challenged to love people more so than my crappy stuff. Stuff is stuff. But unfortunately, stuff more often than not wins out in the possession of my heart than actual souls. It's never more important than positively affecting a persons life. But how many times have I missed an opportunity to positively effect someone through love because they betrayed me, pissed me off, beat me in basketball, stood me up, annoyed the crap out of me, cut me off in traffic, took too long in the DMV line, didn't live how I thought they should live, made stupid decisions and mistakes. I am worse than the thief because I know what I ought to do, yet its still so hard to actually do it.

Priority wise, I want people (even the most annoying pieces of crap) to get hand written notes from me where they totally feel unexpected love. "It's just stuff y'all. Don't steal it from me. Instead, come on in, we'll chat, have some dinner, and if you make a good impression, I may end up giving it to you anyway."

Bible Verses and Shrimp Scampi

For the last eight years of my life, I have primarily surrounded myself with people who would call themselves Christians. If they didn't identify themselves as a Christian, they at least knew in some form about the person of Jesus and the religion of Christianity and the rules that they were supposed to follow (because they were on a Christian campus).

In the past few months, I've found myself in the middle of two jobs that I love and hate.

Job number one: A young adults pastor at Evangel Church. I am the young adults pastor at a healthy and growing church. The staff here at this place are great. They support me and are patient with my unorganized, scatterbrained self. They are helping me get my feet wet in the church and I appreciate this opportunity. The young adults are great here. They are a random and sometimes odd mix of people, but they love God and seem eager to grow in that love. The part I hate about this job is that for a people that seem genuinely eager to grow, I don't know the best way to lead them. I do not know how to lead them into a lifestyle that is exciting, and purposeful, and fulfilling of all that God can accomplish through them. I don't know how to best help them unleash that.

Job number two: A "seafood expert" (server) at Red Lobster. This job pays better than the church, which is good because Sallie Mae and MOHELA are knocking at my door, waving documents with thousands of borrowed dollars that I'm supposed to repay them. This job is different everyday. Every day I encounter new people. Some days the money is good; other days it's non-existent. Some days my customers are super nice; other days a bunch of devils. It's different everyday...and for me, that's a positive. I also have great co-workers. They are a bunch of hazards, but I enjoy working with them and learning more about them. It has been an interesting dynamic as they learn that I am a "pastor" and how they interact with me. The one thing I hate about this job is that I don't know how to impact these people in a substantial way--in a way that changes their lives forever and introduces them to what Jesus has to offer. They are content in the lives they live; the sex, the money, the fun, thrills and getting wasted is all they want. It seems like they'll never want what I have, and I will never really want what they have. A classic standoff.

So for the past eight years I've been around Christian people for the most part. Now I've come to a place in my life where I have a challenge to take a large group of Christians and lead them in their following of Christ and to help develop what it means to love God, love others, and serve the world. I have the challenge to try to get these people to realize that being a Christian is so much more than feeling eternally safe and having a sense of entitlement from God. It's more than coming to church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights with other church friends and talking about God for awhile and then shutting down the spiritual thinking for the rest of the week. Being a Christian is what you are...and because of what you are, you then do.
To be quite honest, it's hard for me to motivate MYSELF to grow in my relationship with God at times. Sometimes, I'm the one that needs to be led. I'm the one who needs to be taught and shown what a real Christ-following life looks like day in and day out. I'm the one who needs to be convinced that living for God is more important than being content or comfortable or easy.

And that's why my other challenge is dually difficult. Because it is not comfortable or easy to try to live a Christian life with my co-workers at Red Lobster. It's hard to try to convince them to follow a God that I sometimes struggle in following myself. It's not comfortable to have to follow in the footsteps of Christians who have treated these people wrongly in the past and now that's why they have a bad personification of the Christian faith. It's not easy to bring up conversation that people will write off from the first word. But it's the situation that I'm in. And hopefully, because of what I am, then what I do will capture the attention of people and intrigue them just enough...

It's a struggle for me to find my purpose in it all.

Milestone.

I haven't blogged since August 30th? Unbelievable. That'll have to change.

I am completely done with school. On saturday, I will officially have a BA in Pastoral Ministry. 5-6 years ago, that is the absolute last degree I would ever have wanted. I wanted to teach high school history and coach basketball. If I ever thought about ministry, which I hadn't, youth ministry seemed like the way to go. I never imagined myself being a pastor. Who even knows if I ever will be one, a lead pastor anyway.

For now, my next big stop will be Kansas City. Back to my home which I love dearly. College ministry, here I come! I am excited to get in this next step of life at Evangel (etkc.org). I also need to find another job that will actually pay me something.

College was awesome. I have had some incredible experiences. This has definitely been some of the most challenging, hilarious, fun, shaping, frustrating, unexpected, epic, hazardous, you-bet-situation, outrageous years in my life. I would probably seriously not trade these past four years for 1 million dollars. That's a million bucks. Lots of benjamins.
I would turn that money down and keep these lessons, experiences, relationships, and memories.

I still sometimes imagine myself being a high school history teacher...

Does Grass Taste Different When You Are Insane?

So I've been reading through the book of Daniel lately and chapter 4 is one of my favorite passages of Scripture in recent memory. It's just really intriguing to me-the whole thing.

King Nebuchadnezzar does not give God the credit He deserves. He thinks too much of himself and in return, God takes away, of all things, his sanity. This great king of Babylon, king of a thriving people group, is scrounging around like a wild animal for 7 years eating grass. 7...YEARS. And finally he realizes that only God is great. This whole thing went down in verse 29-30.
"...he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon. The King reflected and said 'Is this not Babylon the great, which i myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty."
Immediately, he lost it-went crazy and was eating grass. Interesting because it doesn't say that he was proclaiming this to anyone in great number. He didn'y write about it in the Babylonian newspaper...he merely reflected on this idea...this idea that he built this great kingdom. He was just making an observation, possibly to himself. Maybe no one else was even around. But his observation was that he was awesome and that God was not the source of his power and wealth and greatness. He didn't exactly say that; but he said it by the refrain of saying it.

God took away everything that King Nebuchadnezzar had and that is when the king finally got sense knocked into him. It took him acting like an animal for 7 years before he finally realized that only God deserves words like that.

The scary thing about this is that I believe God will do whatever he has to do in order to get our attention. When we don't see our own errors in life, God will eventually help us see them with more clarity than we probably needed. And it doesn't have to just be this issue of self-glorification. It can be a continuous life of a sin, a continuous life of gossip, a life consumed of only apathy, a life of lies, a life of double standards, a life of hypocrisy, a life of judgmentalism, a life of pride.

But could it also be smaller issues also? Issues not seen by others? Personal issues? Mental issues? Issues that people don't see; but maybe God notices.
A life of continuous missed opportunities of evangelism, a life of carelessness, a life of conforming to cultural normality, a life of shallow friendships, a life of no accountability, a life that is comfortable with not growing spiritually.

I believe that God reacted this way towards Nebuchadnezzar because the king essentially declared himself as greater than God-and God's just not going to live with that. But how long until God decides that you or I need a wake up call as well? How long until we just need a little "prodding"?

Is it possible that eventually God will wake me up? Wake you up?

I believe that God will do anything it takes to get our attention.
I'd like to keep my sanity...

Joy

The sweetest thing happened to me today...but its greatness extends over weeks of time:

About a month ago, Craig and I were at a Royals game (which was almost assuredly a Royals win) when Brayan Pena hit a foul ball towards us. I corraled that ball and was real happy. Well, whenever there is a foulball, the ushers have to fill out an incident report--for safety reasons i guess...who knows. Anyway, this old lady usher came down to make sure we were ok and she began filling out her incident card. Usually they only fill out what section the ball was hit to and what time...but I saw there was a place for a name and address and more. So I asked her if I could fill out the whole thing--I wanted the Royals to forever have my name on file. She laughed a cute old lady laugh and said sure.

As she was looking over my information, she noticed that she delivers papers to my house as another side job that she has with the Kansas City Star. So I asked her a legitimate question: I said, "next time you deliver a paper to my house, can you wrap a Royals tshirt in there?" She said she would try and I never expected it to happen.

Yesterday--weeeeeks after our first encounter went down, the old lady (I wish I could remember her name!) showed up on my doorstep, holding two Royals shirts-the ringer tee one

and the retro one! She asked me which one I wanted and gave me the retro one because I didn't have that one. And then she left. I had a Royals shirt delivered right to my door. What a nice old

woman!

I am the luckiest...

Recognition At Its Finest

Acknowledgment is something that all people enjoy. Whether they admit to it or not, a little bit of acknowledgment feels just right. You do something nice for someone else and there is some satisfaction just with knowing that you helped them-but it's a bonus if you get some of that acknowledgment for it. This I know full well.

I'm interning under a lead pastor at a church, Evangel Temple, this summer. A few weeks ago, the Care Ministry Pastor approached me and said, "Kenny, I was talking to Pastor Jason this morning and he told me that you are doing a great job this summer. He probably will never tell you that, but I want you to know that he said it." I tell myself that I don't need acknowledgment and that I don't need to be recognized. That may be true. I don't need it, but I'm never going to rebuke it. I may on the outside...but my insides know me better. Someone who I greatly respect had acknowledged the work I had been doing. Yes please. Acknowledgment.

I was reading in Hosea tonight. This is an incredible story of how God chooses to love, despite the dumb things that Israel had been doing. In Hosea 2:8 it says, "She has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold which they used for Baal." The very first thing that came to my mind was "what have I not been acknowledging?"

God had been all these people could have asked for. He was a provider, protector, deliverer, giver, encourager, their source of hope and happiness, and their lover. He loved them in spite of their sinful selves. And even though God was all these things for them, they not only did not acknowledge this fact, but they took the blessings and the gifts that God gave them and turned around and used them on a false god. A one-two combo to the gut.
The initial jab-they did not acknowledge His unconditional greatness towards them.
The haymaker-they took His unmerited blessings and used them in appreciation of another god.

So I am forced to look at my own life and say "what have I failed to acknowledge from God? What gifts have I been given and turned around and used them for dull purposes and immature gains." God consistently gives me everything I need; He can fulfill my every desire; yet I often run in vain towards other things for fulfillment. I do not acknowledge God enough. I do not acknowledge the greatness that He is.

An acknowledgment of my inability to acknowledge my true provider, giver, and lover.
An acknowledgment that I can no longer claim ignorance of this.