The triumph and brutality of mission...

"God places the lonely in families; he sets the prisoners free and gives them joy..." -Psalms 68"6

I have some friends in our church, who just returned from Africa and this video appears to capture some of the tough stuff they are processing. I see it in the stare, the slow talking, the anguish of two worlds crashing together.

I can feel the unstable emotional equilibrium. I can sense the rage, the powerlessness, the hopeless hope and the mustard seed faith...all kicking and screaming like a baby born...but unable to care for itself...like spiritual mother's who are so exhausted from the birthing, they have no strength...bleeding in heart and soul.

Idealism gets raped by reality in mission.

As a pastor with hands and heart engaged in mission; i've witnessed and experienced this re-entry malaise and mission fatigue. I know God uses it...but I've also seen the enemy use it too. I long to work at building better mission runways for take off and for landing within the local church context, especially the American cultural context. I think people process too much of these conflicting juxtapositions alone....here enters the power of love, community, prayer and journeying together.

I would love to hear more ideas, or helps from anyone else reading this, that could offer some wisdom on this work of aftercare. I plan to use this video in our future aftercare processing.

On another note...it was a beautiful thing, looking into the crowd Sunday and see "Sarah and LemLem" their Africa teenage daughters huge smiles, sitting there with us for the first time. Getting to embrace in love, the girls we all prayed for, helped our friends fight for and now get the chance to walk with.

God is good.

Love truly...bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things...Love never fails. (1 Cor. 13:7)

Love....as I have loved you.

"My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." - John 15:12-13

My 16 year old son, Christian produced this video in November and posted it on his youtube page (http://www.youtube.com/user/CCGBAOcomedy)...I didn't know about until today. I've been looking for a video to use in my message on 1 Corinthians 13...I think I found it.

Yep...me too.

ET...and the Dukes...

Aftermath...

This is a shot from my son Micah's school where I drop him off in the morning. You can see the piles of snow that have slid off the roof, creating a landscape of dirty snow...kinda like a ghetto version of Superman's Ice Castle...but not.

Starwars as a girl remembers it...

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo. From BoingBoing

RAW NERVE....Jan 24th, 6PM @ The Big Dipper

Raw Nerve - The Day I Die from christian blauer on Vimeo.

"Raw Nerve" (www.myspace.com/rawnerve) is the band my son Christian does vocals and plays one of the guitars in. They are competing in a citywide battle of the bands and their first show is January 24th at The Big Dipper. Cost is $8 if you buy the tickets from them, $10 at the door; starts at 6PM.

I just feel safer....

...now that Jack is back.

’seeing through’ things...

“You cannot go on ’seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden, too? It is no use trying to ’see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ’see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” -C.S. Lewis "The Abolition of Man"

Thou art my refuge...

"That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”
-George McDonald

God will soon crush satan....under your feet.

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet -Romans 16:20

In William Gurnall's classic book "The Christian in Complete Armour", he gives much practical advice to Christians. This little snippet is encouragement for us when our peace is robbed.

"When Satan comes to take away your peace, if you do not understand the full significance of your justification in Christ you will be easily overcome. A saint without assurance of salvation is as unprotected as the rabbit that darts into a thicket to escape a fox, but is easily followed by the print of her own feet and the scent she leaves behind. In Christ you have a hiding place where the enemy dare not come: 'the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs' (Song of Sol. 2:14). While the devil may be in hot pursuit of your soul, the very scent of Christ's blood, by which you are justified, is noxious to him and will stop him in his tracks. Run straight into this tower of the gospel covenant, and roll this truth on the head of Satan, as the woman cast the stone on the head of Abimelech: 'To him....that....believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness' Rom. 4:5

Lifted from my Fahdur's blog

New Worlds....

The New World

It begins with a journey.
You must cross an ocean.
Can you imagine...can you feel what it is to cross an ocean?
For weeks you see nothing but the horizon.
All round you, perfect, and empty.
Your ship is small, tiny...a speck in such immensity.

You live with fear, in the grip of fear...fear of storms, fear of sickness on board,
fear of the immensity. What if you never escape? How can you escape?
There's nowhere to go.

So you must drive your fear down, deep into your belly, and study your charts, and watch your compass, and pray for a fair wind...and hope.
Pure naked fragile hope, when all your senses scream at you, Lost!
Lost! Imagine it. Day after day, staring west, the rising sun on your back,
The setting sun in your eyes, hoping, hoping...
At first it's no more than a haze on the horizon,
The ghost of a haze, the pure line corrupted.
But clouds do that, and storms.
So you watch...you watch.

Then it's a smudge, a shadow on the far water.
For a day, for another day, the stain slowly spreads along the horizon,
and takes form...until on the third day you let yourself believe.
You dare to whisper the word...land!

Land. Life. Resurrection. The true adventure.
Coming out of the vast unknown, out of the immensity,
into safe harbor at last.

That...that...is the New World.

-Sir Walter Raleigh in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”
Picture by Marcin Jakubowski

The Chicken of Depression...

Even the darkness is not dark to You, And the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You. -Psalms 139:12

A common mistake I find in sharing ones journey; is attaching too much judgment or explanation to the phases of our temperaments. Dark is purposeful...imagine a world without the nuances of shadow.
Could one endure the brightness of constant light?
We need the moon to balance the Sun.
We need our sleep life to counterbalance our awake life.
Could you truly appreciate much of anything without the multiplicity of opposites?
Is a walk underneath moonlight to be eclipsed by a stroll in evening colors?
Could the world ever bloom with only sunlight and no spring drenching showers?
I think the problem comes when the winter refuses to give way her hold to the advances of spring.
These are the seasons when we need a savior, an Aslan, a doctor, a rescue.
But it all makes up our story...no chapter should be left unwritten, if it has been lived.
The church is weaker because she pretends to presently live in a city without a Moon...but that day hasn't arrived yet.

Depression is a subject that many Christians have a hard time understanding or even talking about. I've walked in shadows a lot of my life...at times into darkness that I needed help recovering from. In the past prayer has helped, diet has had an impact and listening to my life and understanding what my body was saying to me was essential.

For some medications are part of the path towards health. The mind needs a lift, an extra push, a piggy-back to catch it's breath. Sometimes it's in need of a little refill bio-chemically. It's nothing to feel bad or unspiritual about, all our bodies get drained and sometimes need medication to help our own immune system catch up or extra punch to fight off whatever is attacking.

Faith people are often the wrong people to go to for health wisdom...have you looked in the pews? The church is full of sick, unhealthy, mental, angry, supressed, overweight people...God loves them, but don't look for too much wisdom on self-care from them. I say that as a loving pastor. Get help from doctors...not patients.

Remember "darkness" is often the souls cry for light. It's shouting or moaning about deep issues that need healing or need change. Greyness, numbness are often signs that one is walking in a unhealthy lie of some kind. "hope deferred, makes the heart sick". Treatment should help you catch you breath long enough to unpack the heart or mind issues.
Medications are like a life preserver, it won't propell you but it will keep you from drowning.

I thank God for the moon and the sun...I've been able to accept, understand and enjoy who and I am and who God is, more because of it.

Abraham...

Hearing voices, gazing into the heavens,
Grasping hopes beyond reality,
Kissing lips that laugh at possibilities,
Walking paths that smoke, smolder and bleed,

Embracing alternatives, making love out of fear,

Feeding visitors, entertaining angels unawares...
Encountering the future in the present,
And making deals with sovereignty,
Hoping your hand is the better deal.

Putting a knife to your deepest loves,
Obeying more than receiving,
Giving all...without a hesitation.

Leaving your home...for the unknown,
Living day to day in transition...just walking.

Seeing the crying of promise, the tears of hope,
The trembling joy of mystery.

Burying it all in the tomb of finiteness...with old hands but a young heart.

This is faith.

(1.09.09 Eric Blauer)

As part of my new year goals, I've started reading "The Book of God" by Walter Wangerin, Jr. as a devotional tool for my own spiritual life and I think I am going to use it with my family too. It's the Bible written as novel, so the "story" comes through more than a study of the bible. I long to understand the truths of the word of God within the context of the story of the Word of God. Our culture loves stories but rarely endures lectures. I desire to be a better storyteller this year. This poem came out of my time in the story of Abraham. I often take the written word and after it has "spoken" to me, I re-speak it in prayer, song, prose or poetry...and some of these moments find their way into proclamation.

But the best stuff is reserved for God, angels and devils....the first cut into the orange, its the freshest...and the first bite, the juiciest.

African "WILD" life...?

So a couple friends of ours are in Africa right now...and they send me wildlife pictures, but there seems to be something a little askew about this one..

The best wedding dance ever....

Wanda Nevada...an estrogen induced lycanthropy...

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

Oh my...somehow I fought the urge to leave when this came on last night...one of the dangers of leaving the remote available for anyone to get ahold of...but I'm glad that I didn't leave, because this was one crazy weird flick. I rarely laugh outloud...for awhile...I did in this movie; the line that Peter Fonda made about the dog...stunned me. At times in this movie, I wasn't sure where it was going to go...a 13 year old hooking up with a 20 year older man...it was odd, even though nothing took place....the whole theme got odd...not counting the creepy chicken necking dude with the thin mustache, the old man who gets his throat cut, the gun fight that goes on forever but nobody gets shot, the rotoscope indian with his lightening throwing powers and smoking arrows, the fact that Peter Fonda keeps putting cigarettes in his mouth but never smokes them, the glowing skull, the angry shopkeeper...and the sassy Brooke who perfectly captures that strange gangly place that a girl starts awkwardly changing into a woman...not quite girl, not yet ladyThe whole transition is kinda like an estrogen induced lycanthropy...one that she perfectly pulled off, brilliantly acted. It reminded me of the countless moments as a youth pastor that I got to see this bizarre unfolding take place...poor creatures, some manage it better than others for sure. I think girls have it way more tough as far as becoming adults go. It's laughable and tragic all at the same time.

I'm so jealous....

Here is Jon Foreman, frontman for Switchfoot, playing a little post show, on the street impromptu set for some fans; in fact, he's playing my two favorite songs off of his solo cd "Fall". I know its a crappy video but the rawness of it all is cool. If you don't own his solo stuff, you are missing out. He's a great song writer, has a moving voice and he plays some melodic harmonica on "Southbound Train", not on this version through.

This is weird...but I like it.

Everyone's a suspect here.

Where I wish I was...

With all this snow, sore muscles from clearing it, and the post stress of the holiday season...I wish I was right where these dudes are.