Willard Wednesdays

The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter 3 What Jesus Knew: Our God-bathed World (pp. 79-84)

The Spiritual...

Dallas Willard's words in this section help me to remember that I do not need to grow hopeless or afraid in the world.

" 'Spiritual' is not just something we ought to be.  It is something we are and cannot escape, regardless of how we may think or feel about it.  It is our nature and our destiny."

"We always place a tremendous premium on what comes from the center of our being, the heart.  It, more than anything else, is what we are."

"The heart, or will, simply is spirit in human beings.  It is the human spirit, and the only thing in us that God will accept as the basis of our relationship to him.  It is the spiritual plane of our natural existence, the place of truth before God, from where alone our whole lives can become eternal."

"We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one.  It is what we are suited to.  Thus Paul, from his profound grasp of human existence, counsels us, 'To fill your mind with the visible, the 'flesh', is death, but to fill your mind with the spirit is life and peace.'" Romans 8:6

"As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.  We are destined for a time when our life will be entirely sustained from spiritual realities and no longer dependent in any way upon the physical.  Our dying, or 'mortal' condition, will have been exchanged for an undying one and death absorbed in victory.' "

"Of course that destiny flatly contradicts the usual human outlook, or what 'everyone knows' to be the case.  I take this to be a considerable point in its favor.  Our 'lives of quiet desperation', in the familiar words of Thoreau, are imposed by hopelessness.  We find our world to be one where we hardly count at all, where what we do makes little difference, and where what we really love is unattainable, or certainly not secure.  We become frantic or despairing."

"In A Confession, Leo Tolstoy relates how the drive toward goodness that moved him as a boy was erased by his experiences in society.  Later in life, after overwhelming success as a writer, he nevertheless sank into psychological paralysis brought on by his vision of the futility of everything.  The awareness that the passage of time alone would bring everything he loved and valued to nothing left him completely hopeless.  For years he lived in this condition, until he finally came to faith in a world of God where all that is good is preserved. "

"That is precisely the world of the spiritual that Jesus opened to humanity long ago and still opens to those who seek it.  Observing the faith of simple peasants and the deeply meaningful (though painful) lives that flowed from it, Tolstoy was led onward to Jesus and his message of the kingdom of God.  That message then showed him the way to the spiritual world and the 'mind of the spirit,' which, as Paul also said, is 'life and peace.'

The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God.  The 'mind of the flesh,' on the other hand, is a living death.  To it the heavens are closed.  It sees only 'that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die.'  It restricts us to the visible, physical world where what our hearts demand can never be.  There, as Tolstoy saw with disgust, we find we constantly must violate our conscience in order to 'survive'.   Jesus, by contrast, brings us into a world without fear.  In his world, astonishingly, there is nothing evil we must do in order to thrive.  He lived, and invites us to live, in an undying world where it is safe to do and be good..."

CCD Saturday: on hospitality

Following are quotes from Just Hospitality: God's Welcome in a World of Difference by Letty M. Russell

"Hospitality is the practice of God's welcome by reaching across difference to participate in God's actions bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis."

"Practicing God's hospitality means that I am constantly looking for ways to empower other outsiders in the institutions where I work and live.  I always have to ask myself as I gather with a group, 'Who is missing? Who are the ones whose voice is not heard?'"

"In Matthew 25:31-46 Jesus promises to be with those who offer hospitality to the least of our brothers and sisters.  From this it would seem that hospitality can be understood as solidarity with strangers, a mutual relationship of care and trust in which we share in the struggle for empowerment, dignity, and fullness of life.  The word for hospitality in the Greek New Testament is philoxenia, love of the stranger.  Its opposite is xenophobia, hatred of the stranger.  The ministry of the church is to be partners with strangers, to welcome those whom Christ welcomed, and thus learn to be a community in which people are made one in Jesus Christ in spite of their different classes, religious backgrounds, genders, races, and ethnic groups."

Willard Wednesdays

The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter 3 What Jesus Knew: Our God-bathed World (pp. 76-78)

"God is..seen everywhere by those who long have lived for him.  No doubt God wants us to see him.  That is a part of his nature as outpouring love.  Love always wants to be known.  Thus he seeks for those who could safely and rightly worship him."

"Seeing is no simple thing, of course.  Often a great deal of knowledge, experience, imagination, patience, and receptivity are required.  Some people, it seems, are never able to see bacteria or cell structure through the microscope.  But seeing is all the more difficult in spiritual things, where the objects, unlike bacteria or cells, must be willing to be seen."

"Persons rarely become present where they are not heartily wanted. Certainly that is true for you and me.  We prefer to be wanted, warmly wanted, before we reveal our souls- or even come to a party.  The ability to see and the practice of seeing God and God's world comes through a process of seeking and growing in intimacy with him."

"The heavens progressively open to us as our character and understanding are increasingly attuned to the realities of God's rule from the heavens."

"Certainly mere space travel is not the way to discover the divine richness that fills all creation.  That discovery comes through personal seeking and spiritual reorientation, as well as God's responsive act of making himself present to those ready to receive."

"In a striking comparison, Ole Hallesby points out that the air our body requires envelops us on every hand.  To receive it we need only breathe.  Likewise, 'The air which our souls need also envelops all of us at all times and on all sides.  God is round about us in Christ on every hand, with his many-sided and all-sufficient grace.  All we need to do is to open our hearts.'"  

Picnic in the Park 2016: gotta love this next generation!

We had an awesome, energetic first Picnic in the Park of the season!  Picnic in the Park started to grow a culture of community and oneness last season, and it feels like we picked right up where we ended last fall.  A beautiful mix of people playing, praying, serving, eating together.  And the youth! They bring us together and lead us, for sure.

Food Prep 

Playdough and painting fingernails at this table

Rice Krispie servers

Grilling up the beefsteak

Welcome and prayer

More Rice Krispie help 

Who wouldn't love some fresh fruit for lunch?

Harvest Youth Group prayerwalking around the park

Dishes duty

CCD Saturday: Gentrification with Justice

Across the country, people are moving back into the urban centers. Properties once abandoned or neglected are being bought up, and trendy lofts, shops, and restaurants are fast replacing areas that were eyesores for years.  Even Waterloo, Iowa's downtown is making welcome and beautiful changes thanks to some committed developers and investors.  As cities cheer on new economic development, and as wealth comes back into inner city areas (gentrification), what happens to those among lower income brackets who live there? How can we bring revitalization to our downtowns and neighborhoods without continuing the patterns of displacement and segregation?  How can we gentrify with justice? Bob Lupton offers some practices for gentrification with justice below in this article written for the Verge Network: 

Harnessing Gentrification for the Sake of the Kingdom

The definitive works have yet to be written on how to harness gentrification for the purposes of the Kingdom. However, a few guiding principles are rising to the surface from some of the best practices around the country. Here are just a few:

Gentrification is. Some rail against it; others laud its arrival. For good or ill, it is our new reality. And it will only increase in the years to come. It means welcome new economic and social life for our cities and, with the pro-active involvement of the saints, can introduce a whole new era of hopefulness for the poor. Our mantra must be: gentrification with justice.

Diversity is a gift. Communities that are economically and racially mixed can be the richest of environments for families as well as singles and older adults. Diverse community is God's plan, the final destination toward which all the righteous are heading to the City of our God where people of every tribe, every nation, every tongue will take up eternal residence.

Community doesn't just happen. Especially diverse community. It must be built. Focused and sustained effort must be invested in getting to know neighbors, organizing community activities, modeling neighborliness and communicating good news. Love of neighbor must be practical and visible over time.

Indigenous neighbors are a treasure. It is easy to ignore seniors, easy to push on past less communicative neighbors, easy to exclude those who don't show up at community functions. But the rich history of the neighborhood is imbedded in the lives and family albums of long term residents. The effort to extract and honor this history is well worth the time and effort. And everyone, no matter how unlikely, has some valuable talent to contribute to the life of the community.

Economic viability is essential. A community will not be healthy unless it has ample neighbors with discretionary income to attract and sustain businesses. The gentry are essential. However, justice demands that we ensure that the poor are embraced and included as beneficiaries in a healthy community.

God's shalom must be worked at. The roles of peacemakers, communicators, gatherers, organizers, connectors are some of the most vital talents needed for the establishment of peace and prosperity and a prevailing sense of well-being that God desires for His creation. Shalom is not merely the absence of crime on the street, it is the prevailing presence of peace and goodness in the relationships of God's diverse family. It is achieved only by intentional effort.

throwback to Jellyfish Lake

If you go to cnn.com, you can find all sorts of random news stories, pictures, videos each day. The other morning, I stumbled on a link titled "12 Weirdest Lakes in the World" and joyfully found Jellyfish Lake in Palau listed...a lake I had the chance to snorkel in 1991 when we lived on the island of Guam and traveled to Palau to scuba dive for a weekend.    

Jellyfish Lake is packed with a species of jellyfish that have lost their sting.  When we set out to snorkel, our guide told us to look out on the lake and determine where the most direct sunlight was located..and then to swim toward that spot.  Upon approaching the sunny spot, you snorkel into thousands, and you can hardly see past them to any of your fellow snorkelers because the jellyfish are so thick. They are crazy beautiful...and they travel across the lake each day to follow the arc of the sun "because golden jellyfish don’t just enjoy basking in the sun—they need its light to survive. Solar rays nourish essential, algae-like organisms called zooxanthellae, which live symbiotically in the jellies’ tissues and provide their hosts with energy as a byproduct of their photosynthesis."  see this link for pictures and more information:  

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/golden-jellyfish/


There's a good devotion in there, I think.  Following the arc of the Son...not just because we enjoy Him but rather need His light to survive.  Our cells were made to soak up His light in order to really live and thrive. 

"I am the light of the world." -Jesus
"I am the way, the truth, and the life."  -Jesus

Photograph by Ciemon Frank Caballes, National Geographic Your Shot

Willard Wednesdays

The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter 3 What Jesus Knew: Our God-bathed World (pp. 66-74)

Willard spends a good number of pages helping readers understand that the kingdom of the heavens (found 32 times in the Gospel of Matthew) means that God is here...invading the air around us...near and present rather than far off and distant as we've come to understand when we think of heaven.

Willard shares interactions of OT and NT friends of God that show us"heaven is here and God is here, because God and his spiritual agents act here and are constantly available here." And of course, "incarnation in the person of Jesus is the most complete case of 'God with us,' or 'Immanuel'.  

Nicodemus had trouble understanding the birth 'from above'.  "To be born 'from above,' in New Testament language, means to be interactively joined with a dynamic, unseen system of divine reality in the midst of which all humanity moves about -whether it knows it or not.  And that, of course, is 'The Kingdom Among Us.'"  

"But do we actually believe this?  I mean, are we ready automatically to act as if we stand here and now and always in the presence of the great being...who fills and overflows all space, including the atmosphere around our body?"

"The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government-at-hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant or outer space, or even beyond space, is incalculable.  Of course God is there too.  But instead of heaven and God also being always present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time- not here and not now.  And we should then be surprised to feel our selves alone?"  

How might we think and live differently if we recognized Christ and His Kingdom right next to us, all around us, all the time?  As Paul says, "For in Him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28)  Consider this absolute reality and nearness of God as you go about your day today.   

"We may ignore, but we can never evade the presence of God.  The world is crowded with Him." -C.S. Lewis