Revival and Renewal

Maybe it’s because I suffer from chronic nostalgia that I feel compelled to write this. Maybe it’s because I feel like so much has happened. But, really, I think it’s because I have changed so much. We have.

Three years ago Danielle and I were attempting to cope with the reality of leaving a place we loved, a place filled with family and laughter, with lazy Saturday afternoons and big, bright, green Cottonwood trees. I vividly remember the summers in Iowa, that hot and humid cauldron, that place I still love. We were leaving for Seminary, and it was like an amputation. I was excited, “called” even, but we were also devastated to move on. Like Paul and those Ephesians.

But we arrived:

If you were to ask us what we would do next, where we would go after Trinity, I would have told you a plan. It would have sounded good. But, as is often the case with plans, it was wrong. It didn’t include Danielle and I struggling to find a community, wandering like way-wards to Village Church of Lincolnshire, and never leaving. It didn’t include that new place of rest, with the high, vaulted wooden ceiling and the cross draped with cloth. It definitely didn’t include this group of teens I call “the kids.” There was a lot of achievement in that plan, but there wasn’t much laughter, and there was no real hope of genuine community.

I don’t think I realized what God’s hand in my life would look like. As I think of it, I don’t think I ever have. God has got this covert way of doing things, a “smiling providence” that is often far afield from what I conceive of as my route. I feel sometimes like a man in the mountains, so fixed on the directions that he can’t look up and see the beauty of the flowing streams, the valleys and the bird-songs. Then a mighty gust of wind blows the map swiftly out of his hands and down the valley. All he needs to do, and all he can do, is look around and see why he went there in the first place.

Never would I thought that I would stay in the North Shore of Chicago, but I equally never thought I’d serve at a church like Village Church of Lincolnshire. I will be the Associate Pastor there, starting June 1st. God’s plan for us has been to continually remind us how much these people matter to us, and what it means to feel really, spiritually “home.” That, friends, was not my plan, and I am so thankful for that.

In the last three years God has taught us this message: Life in Christ is both the end we strive for and the rest we live in now. In these moments of our lives God has molded us, sometimes through pain and loss, sometimes through joy and fellowship, away from this achievement mind-set that I was so prone to fall into, and toward instead a feeling of home. I remember walking into the Trinity Library the first time, feeling overwhelmed by the number of books and the nearly impossible challenge of my own expectations on myself. Now, I walk into the Library to meet a friend, to have one last study session, or to find some book on art (of which Trinity has few). I used to think that life was about getting-it-done, achievement, doing great things. But it is not. It is about walking in the way of Jesus. It is about following a Master, the One who knows where he is going, and finding freedom in his wake.

Maybe you are saying to yourself, “duh, everyone knows this!” But, if you are anything like me, you are tempted to achieve before you belong, to earn the right to love, and to plan out every last detail to make up for lost time. Don’t. Learn these words anew:

Return to your rest, my soul,
    for the Lord has been good to you. (Ps. 116:7).