No, I did not wash away in the torrential California rains. (The picture at left is a rainbow I found dancing along the Marin County hillside.) The blog has been quiet, because I’ve been way too busy! I’ve been on a circuitous trip of California. I left last Friday, drove an hour to I-5 just as they closed it because of snow. I had to drive back the hour I’d come and take 101 north through Santa Barbara to meet some old friends for lunch in Fresno. Later that afternoon I drove up to Elk Grove to have dinner and fellowship with two couples and a single brother who spilled out of the system a while back. We had a chance to talk together about de-toxing from religion and the joy of embracing relationship with the King and with his people without the complicating factors of guilt and institutionalism.

I spent the next two days with believers north of Sacramento who have been on an interesting journey with Jesus that has resulted in deconstructing their congregational structure. Over the last five years they have transitioned from being a traditional congregation to learning to live as God’s people in relational community. It has not been easy, nor did they see from the beginning where they would end up. In October they ended their Sunday morning gathering, in December their paid staff relinquished their salaries and in January they are selling their building. I’ve been with them a number of times through this process. On Saturday I facilitated some dialogue on “Thriving Outside the Box.” Needless to say there were lots of questions about rethinking the church and relational life without the safety of the box. One theme kept repeating itself over and over with those who had gone through this process: It had not been easy and though they missed some of the props that used to hold up their life together, they had so grown

On Monday I drove down to Fairfield to meet the District Superintendent there who was the person most influential in helping me start BridgeBuilders. From there I met with a delightful man in Marin County who has one of the most incredible salvation stories I’ve ever heard and is helping believers in that area have a positive impact on their public schools. He invited me to come back later and help with a similar effort in Oakland involving a couple of Oakland Raider football players who are deeply devoted to Christ. (Yes, I was shocked to hear that too!) It will be interesting to see how that develops. I ended the day in a home on the San Francisco Bay in Tiburon overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio, Oakland and Richmond. I stayed with Chris and Cathy, two people I’d met in Alaska a few years ago and we talked the night away with breathtaking views of the Bay.

The next day the three of us when to Mac Expo in San Francisco! Many of you know I am a Mac freak and spending the day looking at new products and getting questions answered about programs I have trouble with was incredibly helpful even if it did peg my covet meter. I didn’t spend too much though, but learned a lot. I even had lunch next to a man who called himself an orthodox atheist. Needless to say we had a great conversation. From there I drove down to Gilroy to stay with some dear friends from my Visalia days.

On Wednesday, I drove down to King City to have lunch with a school principal there with whom I attended high school and who had been a pastor for a number of years near where I had made that same mistake. We had a lot to catch up on and I got a copy of an essay he wrote years ago entitled “Moldy Buns in the Pews.” I’m going to use it some day because it is brilliant, humorous and makes a profound point, but am not sure how yet. After lunch I drove back home which was no easy task. Southern California roads are a mess with the mudslides and washouts. Ten people were killed about 20 miles north of us where a mudslide swept through their neighborhood. It too me almost four hours longer to get home since I could not use Hwy 101 and had to go back into the Central Valley and use I-5. But only one lane was open on the southbound side due to a mudslide, so at one point I spent almost two hours traveling only five miles.

But I did get back home. Yesterday I had stitches removed from the surgery I had two weeks ago to remove basal cell carcinoma from the back of my head, tried to catch up on over 200 backlogged emails (so please be patient those of you waiting responses) and prepared for a meeting today to possibly revive our radio show idea from a year ago, but this time with an interesting twist. I hope to share more on that in that with you in the next few days.

What a crazy week, but one filled with so many incredible conversations and moments sharing the life of Jesus with people across the broadest spectrum—from orthodox atheist to radical out of-the box believers..

The pictures in this week’s Time magazine of the aftermath of the tsunami disasters in the Indian Ocean are almost incomprehensible. Over 150, 000 people are believed to have died in tsunami’s rage itself, with the prospect of more deaths to come as unsanitary conditions and disease wreck further havoc on the survivors. I heard one man tell of running from the rising tide with a five-week old daughter under his arm, and couldn’t help but think of my own granddaughter at that age. So many people have died, so many families torn asunder.

The depth of human sorrow and suffering are beyond our imagining. Many have taken to calling it a crisis of Biblical proportions, and it is! Some news reports have said that one-third of the population vanished in the waves in some areas of Sumatra. That same one-third figure is used throughout Revelation 8 as the seven trumpets are blown and disasters follow. I don’t think this is that fulfillment, but it is interesting to note all the same. With a world now ravaged by religious war, and natural disasters, who can say what the days ahead might bring to our generation?

In considering such things, however, I am always a bit troubled by those who call these things God’s judgment, as if he is the destructive influence in creation. There are two things I know. One, God is the redemptive influence in Creation not the destructive one and, two, judgment in Scripture is never something his people dread. The chaos of creation is the fruit of our own sin—a world out of synch with its Creator. Judgment in its truest sense is not God wiping out people in senseless violence but God setting things right. In the Psalms it is why the trees are clapping and the hills are dancing. “God is coming to judge,” is not the cry of terror, but the song of his people. Let the kingdom come! Let the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ! Those are not days to fear, but to celebrate.

So how do we look at these days? Let us not find relief in blaming those affected by the disaster as some how deserving of it. I heard one fundamentalist Muslim cleric note that these happened during the Christmas holidays as Allah’s wrath against Christianity and the moral depravity of western cultures and against Muslims that have not done enough to rid the world of this influence. No, he doesn’t speak for all Muslims, and yes he looked as ridiculous as Jerry Falwell did after September 11, decrying that day of devastation as God’s judgment on America because of homosexuality and abortion that has been legalized in America. Our Father just isn’t like that. Jesus warned us (Luke 13:4) that we shouldn’t think the victims of tragedy any more guilty than those who escape it.

What do we do in tragedy? We weep with those who weep! I cannot imagine how God contains in his great love all the terror of that fateful day and all the sorrow that follows it. I don’t know how he holds in himself the desperate cries of need that rise out of the aftermath today. But he does. Our prayers can join with him as he reaches to people devastated by this disaster. We can also put feet to our prayers by doing whatever we can to help further God’s redemptive purpose in sending money or resources to provide help to those in need—feeding the hungry, providing housing, caring for orphaned children. By doing it for them, we do it for him.

And somehow our hearts can hunger a bit more for the day when this whole world reflects the glory of its Creator rather than the chaos of our sin. We can feel a bit less at home here and the frustration of creation that has been subjected to the futility of sin. And we can let Jesus have a bit more of our hearts today so that we can be even more the sons and daughters of God revealed in the world so that others might know who he is.

My recent blog on Just How Deep Is This Rabbit Hole, inspired a friend of mine to put the finishing touches on a poem she has been working for about five years. I enjoyed it at the same time I related the struggle and the new found freedom that lies at its end. Many of you will recognize her references to various terms we use around Lifestream. I reprint it here with her permission

You can see our Year In Review Photo Album at Ofoto.com for those that want to see some of the places and people we got to hang out with over the past year. We couldn’t include every one or every body, but this will give you a taste of an incredible year…

Also please keep in your prayers the victims of the horrendous tsunami in Asia. And if you can afford to give generously to help in the rebuilding of those stricken countries, please consider doing so. There are many fine organizations that can be a conduit for God’s generosity through you.

And may your New Year be filled with God’s presence as he works in you!

In my last Blog I wrote about the amazing miracle of God making the Word flesh among us—first in Jesus himself, now in us. As I’ve thought about that more, the last phrase from the last verse of O Come All Ye Faithful, has really captured my heart—“Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.”

I live near LA, where our entertainment section is filled with which stars are appearing in which venues here or in Vegas, such as “Celine Dion Now Appearing at Ceasar’s Palace.” It has made me think of the lives I’ve known this year in whom Jesus is now appearing. And I mean that not just because they confess him as Lord and Savior, but because God has changed them in significant ways and liberated them to know him better, even through the most unspeakable tragedies. So that today I can see the Word of the Father in Tim, Nancy, John and hundreds of others whom Jesus is making more like himself. None of these would even claim to be replication of Jesus, but I see him now appearing in them in cities all over the world.

Religion doesn’t transform people. It weighs them down with obligation and busies them with countless activities. While it may compel us to make external cosmetic changes to appease God, it doesn’t change them at the deepest core of their being. Only God does that and I think he does it best as we simply live each day with our eye focused on him and responding to his grace as situations unfold around us.

Nothing illustrates that better than one of my favorite Mike Yaconelli stories, this one from his book Messy Spirituality. He tells the story of Daryl, a reluctant youth group volunteer who got roped into visiting the local nursing home with the youth group. Daryl didn’t want to participate in the service so he stood against the back wall between two residents in wheelchairs. Just as the service ended Daryl was thinking about a quick exit, someone grabbed his hand.

I can’t imagine any greater joy than to be mistaken for Jesus in the way we love and care for others. As this New Year begins, I pray that Jesus will be more visibly seen in me this year and that somewhere often in the year ahead you might be mistaken for Jesus. Word of the Father, now in YOU appearing!

I remember feeling the same awe holding my daughter in my hands 26 years ago on her first Christmas and I it has all come back holding my new granddaughter today. He came like this!
God became part of his own creation in the form of a human being to show us exactly who he is and how feels about us. He took on the helplessness, vulnerability and limitations of human flesh so that he could experience life just as we do, from infancy through adulthood to his tragic but glorious death on a cross.

Isn’t that the most awesome miracle? He was here! In flesh and blood, experiencing the same sorrows and stresses, joys and affections! We get to behold that through the eyes of those who lived with him in those days by their accounts in the Gospels. But the miracle doesn’t end there. He came in human flesh to open a door whereby he could come and live in us. Among his last words to his followers were these:

This is the miracle of all miracles. The Word is still being made flesh in you and me! Christianity is a life lived in him and he in us; it is not primarily a theology, a ritual or an ethic. In this season Sara and I pray that Father will make his presence known to all who call upon him. May you see him in whatever way he makes himself known to you in these days and may you know the depth of his delight in you and the freedom to run to his side in the darkest of days and the brightest of joys!

Most of you who read these pages have no idea what a team effort this is. So many times God has brought to us just the right person with the right expertise at a time when we really needed their help. Without folks like that we would never have been able to publish the books we do, put up the websites we host or travel to the places I go. For each and every one of you who have helped us along the way, please know how grateful we are for your generous heart and service.

As we approach the New Year we are considering some changes in how we do some of the things we do, to expand our capacity to help people on this journey and to automate some of our more menial tasks to free up time for helping others. If you know something about adding a secure shopping cart to our website for people who want to purchase items directly, about automating our email notification lists, or about streaming live audio to the web and would like to help us sort those things you would you please email me. I would really appreciate it.

On a related note, our recent Course Adjustments at Lifestream has brought some wonderful feedback from all over the world. One man wrote from Russia, “I do not know the details of how you support yourself and your family, but I want you to know that I am very encouraged by the decision to offer this resource free of charge.” We don’t talk about money much around here because we don’t want anyone who benefits from the materials here to feel any obligation to us financially. When we began this part of the journey ten years ago now, I promised I’d never beg people for money but look to God to provide for us as he desired. We don’t raise support. We don’t let people know when there is a financial need.

We just do whatever God puts on our heart and watch as he makes provision for us. It has absolutely been amazing over the last ten years how he has done that in so many different ways. We rarely know when a month starts how we’ll have the money we need at its end. But God has been gracious to provide what he desires. Some of that comes through book and CD sales, some through my speaking or consulting work and some through the generous gifts of people who felt a tug on their heart to send us a gift. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve received a check or two or three on just the right day when we needed to have it.

That’s it! No great mystery there. Just a lot of gratefulness to God for being the provider he said he would be, and a heart full of thanks for the various ones he has used over these past ten years to make all of this possible.

I went for a long walk with an incredible woman yesterday. It was the first day of Sara’s Christmas vacation and we treated ourselves to something we’ve been talking about doing for a long time. We boarded a boat at the Ventura Harbor and sailed 20 miles out to the Channel Islands, a national park seeking to restore these magnificent islands in their natural state. They are uninhabited except for campers and offer miles of hiking trails and incredible vistas. The photo at left is of Potato Harbor, a three-mile hike from the dock, on the horizon you can see the mainland.

We both came back from our day together renewed in so many ways. I wonder if the days Jesus loved the most were the ones many would have considered the wasted days of travel—walking from one village to the next with his guys. I have a whole new appreciation for them, having just spent the day with Sara far from any distraction and in the beauty of God’s creation. We observed wild flowers and graceful birds in flight and thought of Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 that when you do so, remember how much Father loves you and be assured that he will take care of you no matter what life throws at you.

Sara and I got to talk about so many things that get swallowed up in the busyness of responsibilities and the distractions of life in the 21st Century. We obviously can’t do that every day, but it’s worth doing more than we take the time to. There’s nothing like long, uninterrupted day together to renew our souls and our relationship to each other. I think our culture has become claustrophobic with its myriad of demands and entertainments. Only by pulling away from it from time to time can we see once again what is most important. And for those who live in colder climates, don’t think I’m trying to torture you here. Next week I’ll be at my parents’ home knee deep in snow and Sara and I will bundle up there and take a walk as well. Freshly fallen snow also has a beauty and stillness all its own.

We sailed back at day’s end to an incredible sunset that peaked just as we docked back at the harbor. I took the photo at left just before the boat docked. It was breathtaking!

On the way back Father had another treat in store. It turns out the naturalist on our tour is a retired Lutheran pastor, who is as disillusioned by the state of Christianity in our day as Sara and I are. We had a great time sharing with him on the way back to the mainland. It seemed he’d learned some similar lessons on the journey about who Father is and how he transforms people. He even asked us if we could give him a ride home afterwards. We did and even gave him a copy of He Loves Me as well.

What an incredible day. It reminds me of something I read last week in Philippians 4:4, and this from the Message again. “Celebrate God all day every day. I mean revel in him!” Yesterday we got to do that. We reveled in his great love and renewed our own for each other. I hope you can find a time and place to do that a well this season. It will touch you in ways you’d never forsee.

As some of you know, this fall has been a ‘winter’ season for me in the parlance of In My Father’s Vineyard. God sent me into a season of rest so that he could prune away on things in my life and in how I live it with him. It has not all been easy and there are still many challenges to overcome, but obedience to him always leads to incredible fruit and I am so grateful for what he has done and will continue to do.

In the language of The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland I find myself today looking down a rabbit hole wondering just how deep this goes. I find his love more present than I could have ever dreamed. I find his involvement in the details of my life amazing, even though he doesn’t do anything like I think he should. And I find every response to him opens up new vistas into his nature and character that are breathtaking. These are not the exaggerations of a wordsmith; this has become my reality with him in ever-increasing measure.

In recent days I’ve been feasting in Colossians. The last bit of the first chapter and the first bit of the second say it as simply as it can be said. Here are some excerpts:

Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen!

God’s life is not something you can study endlessly; it is something you live! If you don’t know how to live deeply in Christ, by all means find out! But don’t think you have to have it all figured out before you can live it. In fact you won’t figure it out until you do live it. Then you too can be awed by just how deep this rabbit hole goes. There are depths of love and heights of joy we have not even begun to explore in his incredible grace. I want so much for you to learn to live this way too and I find no greater joy in this age than helping folks do exactly that.

I got the following email last week about church discipline and thought that others might be interested in this topic as well. This is a blog, remember, so I’m not giving a definitive, this-will-fit-every-situation kind of answer. Rather, I’ll share some thoughts that may help you think through these kinds of situations when they arise.

I think this is an excellent example of how we have taken realities Paul lived in a relational context and try to apply them to an institutional one, and it just doesn’t work. Scripture never uses the term ‘excommunication’. That’s an institutional word not a relational one. What Paul asked the Corinthians to do was set a brother outside of the group who was persistently living in an immoral relationship and which the group was endorsing by their acceptance of it. His hope was this would cause repentance and it did. In 2 Corinthians Paul tells them that the brother has repented and ended the relationship so it was time to bring him back as a brother. The purpose of this was not to ostracize him and shame him; it was just to help him see the reality that his lifestyle was not acceptable in God’s family.

In one sense we are to have scorn for all sin—it diminishes who God made us to be and hurts others around us. So we can hate it as much as God does. However, feeling scorn for sin doesn’t translate into feeling scorn for sinners. For them we show compassion. We all know what it is to cave into sin and know how helpless we are to conquer it in ourselves. I’m glad you’ve still shown that kind of love to your friend and you’re right, God does not reject us in our failure, but invites us closer to him.

We had a similar situation in a group I met with once. I had a friend who was living in a gay relationship and they both wanted to join our group for fellowship. They had come to the conclusion that Scriptures used against homosexuality were being misinterpreted and that God accepted their relationship. Of course our group did not feel the same way. We had a long conversation about it and I told them that while I cared about them, I did not endorse their relationship and neither would others in the group. We couldn’t pretend to be on a journey together when they were seeking to justify something we thought the Scripture clearly defined as outside of God’s will. This would have been very different if they could have confessed it as sin and wanted us to help them find God’s healing and freedom. In any case, they could see that it wasn’t best to come and our friendship survived that. Having a friendship with someone struggling in the bondage of sin is very different from sharing the journey with them in the context of fellowship. I think that’s what Jesus meant when he said to put people out of the body who live in persistent sin. He said to treat them as tax-gatherers, the kind of people he was criticized for hanging out with. Cleary his desire was not to add shame to their lives, but simply let them live honestly the consequences of their choice. But if we don’t love folks like that, how will they come to know him?

The problem I have with what is often called ‘church discipline’ is that it usually only applies to sexual sins, when Paul’s list included far more: “You must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler.” Sometimes the very people implementing such discipline are those who live greedy or gossiping lives. If we’re going to take this seriously, let’s do it for all in this list and not just for sexual sins. But notice what Paul is really driving at here. It’s not the sin that causes the problem, but their attempts to pass themselves off as a brother or sister in that sin. He tells us not to avoid them in the world or treat them with contempt but to avoid the appearance that people are on the journey when they are not allowing Jesus to transform them into his image. The real dilemma is how do we love them without endorsing their point of view, which Jesus had no problem doing and when we learn to walk in compassion and truth we will find that freedom as well.

In your specific case, and assuming these are all the facts, this doesn’t seem to fit Paul’s teaching at all. To call an inappropriate conversation or even forbidden attraction ‘adultery’ is a gross misunderstanding of the Sermon on the Mount. Depending how deep it was it might have been a good idea to release him from leadership, but to ostracize him from fellowship for this kind of thing is really ridiculous. I think these are the kind of instances where Galatians 6 comes into play. When you find a brother or sister faltering, go rescue them with gentleness and tenderness knowing that any of us could fall into the same kind of trap. Body life is not a shared journey of those who are perfect, but of those growing to know him and passionate to be changed into his image, not find endorsement for our sin or failures. Until we get honest with the fact that we all struggle against various kinds of sins we’ll never find the depth of fellowship that God offers us. As long as we have to pretend to be better than we are to find fellowship, our fellowship will be false and ineffective. Paul points that out in so many ways in the totality of his writings.

When Paul tells the Ephesians that “there must not even be a hint of sexual immorality” among them, he is offering his hope, not the reality. You can’t read through the epistles and not see that sexual failure was an ongoing part of the struggles of those early Christians. Paul invited them to the greatest freedom imaginable in the life of Jesus. He didn’t tell them to reach that goal by kicking everyone out who struggles with sexual sin. Try to do that and you’ll just have a group of people who have learned to hide it better.

So, I hope those thoughts are helpful. The great thing about a blog is that others can weigh in on this important topic as well. So, agree or disagree, feel free to add your thoughts below and let’s see what we can all learn through this.