When life is going well

It's amazing how your perspective on life changes when things are going well. After coming out of 6-9 months of incredibly difficult ministry, things have finally turned a corner. For the last year, anytime anything good would happen, something horrible would follow on its heels, but I'm actually getting to the point where I've stopped waiting for that other shoe to drop. Could it be that God actually wants to bless us and our ministry? I wasn't blogging this summer when my wife Lori and I were sorting through some of this, but just to give some brief highlights of what we've learned...

Walter Brueggeman (theologian) talks about the Psalms in terms of psalms of orientation, psalms of disorientation, and psalms of new orientation. I used that framework in my sermon series this summer. In June, I preached through 4 different psalms of orientation (life is happy, God is good, la la la la la). Then in July I preached on 4 different psalms of disorientation (where did God go, why has everything fallen apart, etc.). In August, I preached on 4 psalms of new orientation (oh, there he is...he came through in the end, but I'll never see him in the same way again). As we followed that pattern in church, our lives kind of followed the same pattern. So though things got fairly dark, in the end we've come to a place where we're confident in Jesus (to the extent that we know and understand him). We're confident in his calling on our lives. And we're confident that we are going to follow him no matter what, even when he decides that we need to go through the ringer.

So now after having taken a beating and stayed standing, we're finding ourselves more confident in Jesus, more hopeful in the future that he has for us, and even more able to trust him for whatever happens next.

And right now, whatever happens next looks pretty good. On Saturday night we had the party that I wrote about in my last posting. It was fantastic. These strangely different groups of people all melded together and had a great time getting to know each other. Everyone had fun, relationships were established, maybe even friendships. My wife, by the way, was incredible. She was really nervous going in because she has never been comfortable in a party setting, but she was having incredibly deep conversations with people all night long. I'm really excited about where the ministry to this very dark neighborhood goes next.

Then yesterday at church, we had 6 families that were new or visiting again. For a church of our size, that was pretty incredible. The best thing is that these are not just Christmas visitors. These are people who are really hungry and looking for a church. Three single moms and 6 kids came together from another of the rougher neighborhoods in town and had a great time.

Then today someone from our church picked up a check for $190,000 from a work accident and is giving the church about $25,000 of it, so tomorrow the two of us are going shopping to replace my clunky laptop. Better, in about 9 months he'll be getting a bigger settlement check for somewhere in the $2,000,000 range which he has committed to tithing from to the church. Suddenly all financial worries have disappeared as well.

So does all of this mean that there's something really, really, really bad on its way? Maybe, but I'm hopeful that we're going to stay on this upward trajectory for a while.