Today Sara and i are celebrating 31 years of marriage. Amazing! As we sat and reflected on that this morning, we were so grateful that God has given us a way to let everything that has happened, good and bad, in the last 31 years draw us closer to each other instead of driving us apart. Today we are better friends than we’ve ever been. We’re partners in each other’s journey at every level and I don’t know anyone I’d rather spend time with than Sara—whether we’re in intense prayer, laughing our bellies to soreness, hanging out with good friends or sorting out some question one of us needs resolve.

She truly is the love of my life, my best friend and most endearing sister in Christ. We have all kinds of private jokes between us no one else shares. Her laughter makes me light up. I love the way she lives her life, loves our kids and treats people around her. I can’t believe the joy Father has led us to together and look forward to whatever lies ahead together.

Tonight we’re not even together, and it isn’t due to my travels. Sara has an awards dinner tonight at the Reagan Presidential Library for some of her seniors. But as I write this I can’t stop smiling. Whether we’re together or apart, she is my joy, and I know she’ll always come home!

I know marriage doesn’t sort out this way for everyone, and it makes us sad when we find couples who haven’t learned how to cling to each other, even in their differences and learn to rely on him together. Sara and I have been through some painful times. There was even a season of pain, I wasn’t sure our marriage would survive. What we enjoy now is the fruit of a lifetime shared and I do think there is a way for every couple, if they will explore it TOGETHER, to find their way into the absolute joy and bliss God had in mind when he made a man and a woman and put them in his garden together. Don’t give up! It’s worth sorting out with Father, and with your spouse!

I read this little prayer on the podcast last week and Lindsay asked me to post it on the blog. I realize this can be a slap in the face to someone in great pain, but for folks on the other side of it, it is a powerful affirmation of what God does in his people. Only as we lose our agenda to put our lives together the way we think best, can we enjoy Father in the midst of our trials and tragedies…

This ‘blessing’ was prayed over Henri Nouwen by his spiritual mentor:

May all your expectations be frustrated.
May all your plans be thwarted.
May all your desires be withered into nothingness.
That you may experience the powerlessness and the poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

I love the term ‘relational’ when it speaks of how we live this walk. To me, it means to live out of relationships—the first one with the community of Father, Son and Spirit, and then to share that experience of community with people in our lives.

I notice the term, however, is now being by people to describe house church, small groups, or even large congregations that set to be more focused on relationships. People even write me telling me they want to be more relational so they are going to start a small group in their home.

Living relationally is not about whether or not you go to a specific group. Living relationally means you recognize that God is a God of relationships and works through our relationship with him and our relationships with others. Those who are relational make room in their lives for relationships. They get to know their colleagues at work, their neighbors down the street and find time to encourage other believes, whether they are or are not on a similar journey. And when they find brothers and sisters who share their passion and hunger for the kingdom they take time to let those relationships grow, whether it is through face-to-face contact if that is possible, or even on discussion boards and email if it isn’t.

Being relational is an active lifestyle, looking to engage relationships, even at the most rudimentary level to anyone that cross their path. It may only be a greeting in passing at an airport, or a conversation in the grocery store line, but it says that people are important to Father and to me and I’m going to make room in my lives for others, and watch what God does with the relationships he gives me…

Don’t go this alone, or wait quietly in your home for fellowship to break out. Just live each day open-handed and gracious to everyone you can, without any agenda, and watch what God will do through you to bless others, and through others to encourage you.

As I wrote earlier Sara and I are reading through The Christ of the Mount by E. Stanley Jones while she gets ready to leave for work in the morning. This book is a classic study through the beatitudes. Writing about the first two beatitudes he wrote:

The end of human life will be either the finished egotist or the perfect lover. The first beatitude is the end of the egotist, the second is the beginning of the lover. It is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sorrows and sins of others.

Wow! That feels like a slap of a two by four upside the head. I’m not sure we get to perfection on either of those two extremes, but I like his point nonetheless. Living in the love of the Father, will continually call you outside of yourself to love others in the same way you’ve been loved. If we don’t learn to live in the Father’s love, then or lives grow increasingly ego-centered and narcissistic. We may try to make it look loving, but all we do is manipulate people and situations around us to get what we want.

Certainly living to ourselves will produce the egotist, but interestingly enough so will our service of religion. Religion still puts the focus on our selves, even when we’re trying to produce for God. In the end we still become an egotist instead of a lover. I want to learn that lover part more every day and embrace Jesus purpose for my life each day, rather than trying to fulfill my own agenda, no matter how convinced I may be that it comes from him.

Travel the next few weeks will take me to Sacramento this weekend, and then over Memorial Day weekend to the Detroit area in Windsor, Ontario. From there I’m going to make a quick stop in Iowa to help a school district sort through an anti-harassment policy near Des Moines. I’ll be there May 30 and 31. After that it’s Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and then Sara and I hope to take a vacation into the Pacific Northwest… But only, if the Lord wills…

I’m a bit behind on email, so please don’t give up hope if you’re waiting for a reply. I’ll get to you. I’m editing a book now and that has got me busy, but I had the most incredible weekend. For the first time in a long time, I just hung out with Sara. We did do some yard work in her growing garden in the back (not my favorite thing) and spent some time with my son who came home unexpectedly. It was great and needed. Without periodic times away from everything lifejust bogs us down. We weren’t made to keep rushing from one thing to the next. Sometimes it is so good to just sit back and do nothing! It was that kind of weekend for me.

Don’t miss the latest God Journey podcast. I interviewed some wonderful brothers from Ireland and they tell their story of how God called them to dismantle the growing institution they had 25years ago and taught them to live as his community in and around Dublin. It’s a fabulous story. It is similar to the Fairlee story I told some years ago…

I also got a call from NPR (National Public Radio) that did an interview on the recent goings on at BridgeBuilders and are supposed to play some bits of that on their Wednesday morning show, ‘Morning Edition’ but don’t hold me to that. If they put it on the web, I’ll try to enclose a link later. [Update 4/26 – Link to NPR story. Click on the ‘listen’ button at the top of the page.]

I thought returning home from Ireland wouild give me time to post some thoughts on this blog, but it has been a whirlwind since I got home from Ireland. I had tons of work to catch up on at home as well as keeping up with email, podcasts and other wild things in my life. I’m also helping a friend rewrite a book that we’re hoping to publish soon and tunr into a movie. More on that in an upcoming blog.

But today I had to drive down to Orange County to do a BridgeBuilders presentation for a group of California educators. Now I am at the Orange County ariport waiting for a late night flight to Seattle, where I present a workshop tomorrow for the Washington Conference of School Attorneys on BridgeBuilders mediation strategies for cultural and religious conflicts. I have to be there first thing in the morning, and I have yet to recover from Ireland. After the conference I’m meeting a friend for lunch before catching a 5:00 flight back to Orange County to get my car and then tackle the (hopefully!) 90 minute drive home.

I actually plan to pass out this weekend. The last couple of months have been exhausting and I am far behind on so many things. I hope that doesn’t sound like complaining; it’s just the reality. Though I’m at the end of a pretty concentrated stretch, I love leaving it all on the field at the end of the day. I really enjoy each of the things God has put in front of me and enjoy waking up every morning to see what each day will hold. For now, I only hope for enough strength to be coherent tomorrow and responsive to their questions with helpful answers.

Then I’ll look forward to a recuperating weekend at home. After all that, I might get back to some intelligible postings here!

I’m not too loaded up in May. I’ll continue working on the book and have a trip planned early in the month to Sacramento, CA and later in the month to Canada, across the border from Detroit. Oh, yeah! Sara and I also have our 31st Anniversary in the middle of the month. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. She is such a treasure.

I often think Christianity Today misses the important realities of what God does in the world, so when they hit one out of the park I’m not only surprised, I want to share it. In the March 2006 issue of Christianity Today, they printed an article on the influence of believers on culture entitled, Loving the Storm-Drenched by Frederica Mathews-Green. It is the most incredible article I’ve ever read on the subject and I wanted to shout AMEN virtually with every paragraph. I’ll quote some excerpts here, but I’d really encourage you to follow the link above and read the entire article.

What’s more, (the culture) is already changing – constantly, ceaselessly, seamlessly – changing whether we want it to or not, in ways we can’t predict, much less control. If you take the cultural temperature at any given moment, you will find that some of the bad things are starting to fad, and improvement is beginning to appear; simultaneously, some good things are starting to fall out of place, and a new bad thing is emerging.

Not only can we not control this process, we can’t even perceive it until changes are so far developed as to be entrenched. Chasing the cultures is a way to guarantee that you will always be a step behind the times.

God has not called us to change the weather. Our primary task as believers, and our best hope for lasting success, is to care for individuals caught up in the pounding storm. They re trying to make sense of their lives with inadequate resources, confused and misled by the Evil One and unable to tell their left hand from their right.

This focus on an external, public sign is contrary to the mission of the church. Christ planned to attract people to himself through the transformed lives of his people.

But if someone should actually see our billboard, and be intrigued, and walk in the door of a church, he would find that he had joined a community that was just creating another billboard.

Culture is not a monolithic power we must defeat. It is the battering weather conditions that people, harassed and helpless, endure. We are sent out into the storm like a St. Bernard with a keg around our neck, to comfort, reach, and rescue those who are thirsting, most of all, for Jesus Christ.

One more day here and then we will get on a plane Easter Sunday morning to head on home… and sometime on Easter afternoon I will get another hug from Aimee, my 16 month-0ld-granddaughter who is just learning to ‘hug back’. She gave me one on the day before I left and it was so amazing. I told her she has the amazing power to make so many people so happy just by giving them a hug.

And then I realized that we all have that power every day with people God might bring in our paths who need someone to love them.

I’m so sorry I’ve had such little time for updates this trip. I’m exhausted with all the running around we’re doing and the people we’ve met. But it has been FABULOUS! The people here are amazing and have taken to Sara and me as if we were long, lost friends having returned home. What an absolute joy. And amazingly enough the weather here has been superb. I’ve gotten a chance to play two rounds of golf during my stay and we’re headed out this morning to a men’s tournament with a bunch of the brothers around here. (Sorry, gals, none of the wives here seem to play golf!)

Anyway, a couple of days ago I recorded an interview with two of the brothers here who were involved in this group of folks dismantling their institution 25 years ago to learn to live as a community of God’s people in the Dublin area. We’ll use it on a future edition fo The God Journey. It’s fabulous. When we were talking about some of those things later in the day, one of the wives said how blessed she has been that all the relationships from those days have grown on over the years with such beauty, depth and grace. She wondered if they hadn’t laid it all down when Father asked them to if they would have the same relationships today. Wouldn’t it have been easier for them to end up in conflict over how things should be run, who should be in charge, and what they should be doing.

That got me thinking. Maybe that’s what happened back at the congregation I was with 15 years ago. I see now how God may have been asking us all to lay it down and walk away and if we had all those relationships wouldn’t have gotten shattered by the agendas of men. Hmmmm…. Some of us did walk away rather than fight those who wanted to take possession of God’s working, but if we all had, I think what she said would have been true. If our participation in the resurrection life of Jesus is found in our own willingness to lay our lives down when he asks, why wouldn’t there be a corporate expression of that? There are times when God does wonderful things among us and if we could just enjoy them for what they are instead of turning them into institutions, maybe our relationships wouldn’t get broken, maybe the kingdom would grow freely in the world, and maybe we would really see the living expression of his family in the world.

I’m sure you can’t ‘lay it down’ too often in this world. What we grasp for, we lose. What we give up we seem to be able to enjoy without being owned by it.