It’s a pretty live question how much possibility for self-determination really exists. I tend to think it’s different for different people. You didn’t get to choose all your circumstances, and some of those have an extremely powerful influence on the person you are and will continue to be. Even becoming fully aware of all the things that influence who we’ve become can be tough—rewriting ourselves in the midst of that can be even tougher.

But you have to try.

You have to fight for the possibility that you can grow, change, and struggle to become someone else. Sometimes you have to restructure some of the things in your life, enlist help from other people and God, and just dig into the struggle to become the person you discern God called you to be. Because while I don’t think we have absolute power over our own self-determination, the minute we give in and just accept ourselves as accidents of fate, the moment we accept the way we are as the way we have to be, we get stuck. We stop growing. And the minute any living thing stops growing, it starts dying.

It reminds me of the famous Lombardi quote upon arriving to coach the Packers: “Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence.” That’s really the way it is: You have to be willing to chase some things that ultimately might be out of your grasp, because we humans are at our best when we’re chasing something. But we don’t have to chase anything, and there are infinite choices about what we’re going to pursue.

That’s why intentionality, the practice of making distinct choices about who we want to become and what we want to do, is so important. You don’t get to make all the choices, but the ones you do get to make really, really, really matter.

I suppose in the back of my mind, a major part of what I’m doing in life is that simple—I’m trying to help people feel good. Sometimes that means ministry is about helping them get right with God, because when you’re out of line with God, it jacks up everything else. Sometimes it means helping people find something to do with themselves besides just turning the page on the calendar. Ministry means helping them see that there can be more to their life than chasing paychecks, boys, girls, and what passes for glory these days. Sometimes it means helping people pick up the pieces when they lose something like their job or their family. Sometimes it is full of the really hard work of helping people figure out what the next step is for them to take responsibility for their life, whether that means fixing or abandoning some old relationships or trying to figure out how they’re going to pay off the credit card. Lots of times ministry is about giving people a place where they feel like they belong.

Sometimes, and maybe most of the time, ministry for me means just trying to help people believe that somebody else in the universe cares what happens to them. I guess I believe that if people think I care about them, it’ll help them believe that God cares about them. That seems to me like an important thing to do.

I got into this business because I had a chance, early in life, to feel what it was like to help somebody get right, to help them untangle stuff in their mind just a little bit, and feel loved. I wanted to help everybody feel like that.  I suppose that’s what I’ll try to do again tomorrow.

Our family has been in such an intense transition phase for the last two months that it is with some measure or relief that I can look into this coming week and see what looks like a pretty normal week.

Yeah, right.

It might lack things like buying and moving into a new house, new baby nieces, a new work routine, ordination ceremony or those first awkward sermons, but I bet its really all that normal. “Normal” is a mythical creature on par with unicorns and leprechauns, and you can miss out on a lot of living by chasing it.
Things like loving your family, doing work that you love, deepening your friendships or encountering real life human beings, in all of their oddities, isn’t normal, it’s the extraordinary gift of life.

“Normal” is overrated. In fact, the more I think about it, I’ll be quite disappointed if my week turns out to be normal.

I hope you have a crazy week, too.

(Note: This week’s posts will likely be short and have a few typos. We won’t have home internet until Later this week, so I’m writing on my phone!)

Yeah, that just about describes where I’m at today. It’s a fuzzy, vague thing to be transitioning in ministry. I’ve certainly felt busy, even with those odd moments when I had no idea what to do next. Tomorrow, though, marks one of the few really concrete aspects of my new life. Tomorrow I’ll begin preaching, something I’ve been preparing for over the past couple of weeks, if not years. And while I know my roller here isn’t all about what happens in the pulpit, it still feels like kinds of a big deal.  Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.

The other side of that anticipation, is that I really am looking forward to worshipping with the church tomorrow. I’m getting such a different look at worship now, and being involved with the planning really helps me look forward to what’s going to happen on Sunday, and is helping me build some personal anticipation of worship with God’s people.

I feel like I’m near the top of the hill. Below me, I hear a final clink, raise my hands, and off we go.

Scream if you want.

We’ve been fairly disconnected from the internet over the past week, so I have a lot of things I’d like to share via the blog, little snapshots of what our move has been like so far.  They’re starting to become more distant memories.

Big Truck

I have a CDL, and am used to driving a big church bus, but even with that I was amazed how easy it is to get a big honkin’ truck from uhaul, and even one towing a trailer big enough to put my pick-up on it.  The lesson here is, anytime you’re on the road and you see the word uhaul on a truck, STAY AWAY!  Remember that it could be any fool with a drivers license, and that is most likely their first time to drive anything near that size.  That are almost certainly a nervous amateur.

Micah’s Cry

On our move day, we left fairly early in the morning, and did pretty well holding ourselves together emotionally all day.  Being met by an army of new friends to help us move in helped a great deal, but when everyone left, there was a very tender moment when Micah, our sweet 3 year old, started crying, saying, “I want to go to my house.”  When we said, “This is our house”, she responded with the heartbreaking, “No, I want to go to my home.” Ouch.  That really stung, partly because she was saying what all four of us were feeling somewhere in our hearts.  This was our most tearful moment.

Loving the “New House”

After that first night, the girls have been all about going to “the new house”.  They love playing in their new room, and while getting them to actually sleep in their beds is a chore, that’s not anything new. They just laugh and play and giggle, and their ease of adjusting is certainly making it easier on Kelly and me.  Kids can be so flexible (sometimes).

Night Out

The Harden girls sweetly agreed to babysit for us the first Friday night we were here, and of course that raised the question, “What in the world do we do in Tullahoma on a night out?”  ultimately, we settled on a trip to go see Robin Hood at the local drive-in theater.  It was a great adventure, and such a nice time to unwind with each other.  We needed that.

Mothers’ Day is always a good day for life reflections, and that held true for this year, even if the reflections came amidst a higher level of chaos than normal. I’ve been so blessed by having a great mom, and by being surrounded by great mothers!

Here’s a really sweet picture of Kelly being a good mom this Sunday.  Aren’t they all so sweet!

(The pillow was her gift.  She would love for you to comment on its cuteness.  Personally, I think there are three things in the picture infinitely cuter.)

To chronicle a bit of that, over the last few amazing weeks we’ve packed most of our house, had some great pictures taken of the girls to mark their impending third birthday, sold an extra car, had some great farewell dinners with great friends, and the biggest surprise:

Sold our house.

I need to give a great big shout out to our good friend and realtor Shelly Dahl for helping us sell our house in an amazing four days. We had planned on having on the market for a while, and had budgeted under the assumption that we’d be carrying that mortgage, so we’re thrilled to be out from under that burden! Great work, Shelly!

Odds and ends abound now.  Addresses to change, utilities to cancel, people to hug, a final sermon to prepare.  All the while, Kelly and I are preparing our hearts for a new path of ministry and a new community to join.  These are busy days, but it’s not all task-based checklist work.  Much of it is heart work, preparing our hearts for a transition that affects us in deep places.  Our roots are deeper here than we could have guessed until we started digging them up.

We drive out on May 17.

I will worship my God on the mountain of his love in the light of his presence.  God is my every thought of truth and of love.  All I am or could ever hope to be I am because he has loved me.  today I know again the longing to be his child.  I know what it is like to be loved and I pray with a heart that is his forever that I may become love to his creation.  God is love, he gives me peace, he shows me truth, he leads me to light, and he knows my heart.  May he take it and help me.  I desperately need him.

What most people don’t realize is that board games are experiencing something of a renaissance now, and there have been some very creative games developed over the last ten years or so, games created and marketed on a smaller scale but which, thanks to the friendly Internet, are readily available anywhere on the planet. If you’re a little adventuresome, you can get into all kinds of fun. Before I give you my list, though, I need to tell you why I love games.

Communities are built by lots of different factors. Common purpose and language are major factors, as is our old friend common experience. That comes in a lot of different forms over time, including the common experience of tragedy and victory, or change and challenge. Certainly those are all poignant moments, each instance of which can be independently significant to a community’s formation and understanding of itself.

Underrated, though, is the consistent experience of common play together. We sometimes fail to value how playing together, in all the forms that can take, shapes and deepens the bonds between us. When we play together, we create patterns of understanding each other, grooves of being. I begin to understand my friends boundaries, the way they communicate, and what moves and motivates them.

Of course, there are a lot of forms of play. Games, physycal, strategic, or intellectual, can play a part, as might dancing or shopping (you know who you are). Certainly board games are just a subset – not any kind of magic community building bullet. Each community just has to find the forms that work best for it.

For us, we’ve had a ton of fun playing the games below with our amigos. I thought it’d be fun to make a list like this, since these are perhaps a little unusual.

1.  Carcassonne is a fun little game that is part puzzle, part cutthroat strategy.  The learning curve isn’t too bad at all, the game is very balanced, and you can go through a game easily in a half-hour.  That means you usually have time to play a few rounds, which means more chances to win.  It’s probably Kelly’s favorite of all these games.  She is absolutely brutal as a farmer.  There are some expansion variations available, and they’re kind of fun, too.  I think the original game is enough to keep us busy for a while though.  This game opened us up to a lot of different strategy games we wouldn’t have tried before.

2.  The Settlers of Catan might be one of the best of the newer breed of strategy games.  It’s got a tremendous upside: It’s easy to learn, lots of room for strategy to minimize the effects of luck, and some mechanisms (variable board, for instance) that change the game enough that it can feel really different each time you play it.  It does take a bit longer for each round (2 hours if you’ve played before),  and the game as it comes can only take four people.  You can buy an expansion pack so that six can play, and should, but that increases the cost a bit.  This is an extremely fun game, and has a pretty addictive element.  I’m almost always up for a round of this.

3.  Munchkin is perhaps the quirkiest of the games I’m posting here, and perhaps the riskiest as well.  It’s a role playing card game, with an odd set of rules that seems to always change.  Boring people should not play this, but if you have some friends with a little extra imagination, it can be a terribly fun game.  It takes a while, and every time we play it feels like we have to make up our own rules.  Nonetheless, I like it a lot, and Kelly feels sort of “eh” about it.  The best thing about it comes near the end, as there are almost always climatic contest to see who is going to walk away the winner.  There are a lot of extensions to this game, and I appreciate the wit of the creators.  I should note that you might want to censor this game a bit though, as some of the cards can be a little sketchy.

4. Pandemic.  Okay, this is an extremely fun game, but for different reasons.  The biggest quirk is that the players (up to four) don’t compete against each other, but with each other against a set of diseases that threaten the world.  Everybody’s on the same team in this game, so it really ends up being a cooperative strategy game.  That’s a very different type of experience, but I have really liked it.  The game last about an hour, is relatively easy to pick up, and gets fairly intense as it reaches the end stages.  It’s remarkably well balanced.  You can adjust the difficulty somewhat, so it’s a game you can grow into as you master the concepts.

Bonus:  I’ve recently picked up a new game, called King Me!, which the jury is still out on.  I like the design and gameplay a good bit, but we just haven’t played it enough yet for this to be “The 5 best games you’ve never played.”  I’ll keep you posted, though.  So far, I do think it’s fun!

So there are my current favorites.  Anybody else want to chime in on a fun game you’ve run across lately?  I’m always up for something new!

As we closed, we finished by reflecting on two names: one of a person who has been our refuge, and one that we are working to be a refuge for.

It may be that we need to keep the second of those confidential, but I wonder if some of you might feel comfortable sharing the name of someone who has been your refuge?  Who has been there when you needed them, when you felt alone, in need, at risk, hurt, worn out, or ashamed?

For me, it’s a long list.  Here, I’d like to say that Jerry and Christina Burchfield have been that kind of refuge for me since the time I first came to Little Rock.  At times, they offered literally shelter for me, a place in their home while I saved up money to make a down payment on a house.  They’ve given me copious amounts of roast chicken and corned beef, and more than a glass of sweet tea.  Jerry’s given me good advice on life and taxes, and they’ve always been supportive of me in times when I needed it, when something hard was going on, or if I was doing something stupid.  Their friendship has been a creative force in my life for the last ten years, and I’m very thankful.  I want to give that kind of friendship to others.

What about you?  Who is it that has given you refuge, who has helped you heal and grow?  Who has been your safe harbor?