recklessly dreaming

My students come back (the 6 leaders are here in just over a week with the others a week behind them). As I have been getting ready for them to return, I have been thinking and wondering how you go about training people for ministry. Not how to you train people to program or lead a small group or plan a worship time. How do you walk along side students as they prepare to live among others for a year and live an incarnated life? How do you teach them that presence is more important than words? How do you show them that their lives will show (or not) the Christ life more than their devo times together? How do you help them grasp a bigger and more dangerous and demanding vision of Jesus and the gospel than they default to?

 _______

 I really have come to love the city (LA is great - but it is fantastic to live just up the coast). The ocean is 5 minutes - from my apartment to standing in the sand. I live on the side of a mountain (I believe the word is nestled). But I live in a very broken place with broken and hurting people. My neighbors are constantly on the front pages of the magazines and there is a chance that they will be standing behind you at the grocery store the same day that they are on the cover. If you live here with star-glossed eyes, you miss the people and then you miss the heart of the town. The photographers don’t make you excited to see who it is, but sad that the person in front of you can’t buy a cup of coffee without another person trying to capture it for the world. You miss that they are parents who are trying to best by their kids. I love getting to be a part of the community in so many different ways. A group of us play softball here in the Malibu city league. Recently some of my teammates have showed me what it looks like, in the midst of great brokenness, to be community. What it means when family and friends have long left - to sit with another surrounded by the darkness, but knowing that there is a way out of the hole. When one who has been sober from addiction for twenty-years loves the one working on a year. This week I have spent a good amount of time home sick. During some quality time with my couch, I got glimpses of these two sharing the story on abc and cnn. I am hopeful that their story will help others. One of the many parts of my Malibu community that I am grateful for - I love the way people find their way to our team. Life together.

The 12″ powerbook lives. I love it - it is fantastic. The consumer in me is ready to replace it, but not with the macbook, not yet. I am still holding out hope (and onto the rumors) that a smaller macbook pro will come. For those that gave tehir input, thanks. It has been apple cared (covered for another two years) and the ram upped. Blazing fast? No. Meet my needs for a bit longer. yes. Apple don’t let me down.

leg one of the roadtrip from LA to New York is complete - sleeping soon in Denver. night

I sit here working on papers, answering emails, cleaning my bathroom rug (I love it when things overflow into your apartment when you are gone all day), trying to reacquire my taste for coke, and getting used to my new keyboard (the best investments I have made recently are a fantastic 19″ hd monitor and a cordless laser (?) mouse and keyboard for my 12″ powerbook (when o apple will you release the wee macbook pro? we are waiting), and I keep thinking back to this past weekend. This year I was able to reflect on each of the three days (including a very “saturday” sandwiched between Good Friday and Easter Sunday at the beach watching the powerful waves crash in the final moments of the dark night of Saturday) - there may be another post coming about that night (my track record with this site might suggest otherwise). I just sent an email asking for the prayer of contrition that I led for our campus Good Friday service. Here it is for you (and the link for the site which it was modified from):

God, who has been revealed to us as the I AM,
On this Friday, we stand together as sinners at the foot of the cross of the crucified Christ.
God who is the I AM, remind us that if you are the I AM, then we are not.

As we stand here at the with the crucified cross before us,
Give us spirits of humility before others and humility before you.

O Jesus, meek and humble of heart,
Hear us.

From the desire of being esteemed,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the desire of being loved,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the desire of being honored,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the desire of being praised,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the desire of being approved,
Deliver us, O Jesus.

From the fear of being humiliated,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the fear of being despised,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the fear of being calumniated,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the fear of being ridiculed,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged,
Deliver us, O Jesus.
From the fear of being suspected,
Deliver us, O Jesus.

That others may be loved more than we,
Jesus, grant us the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than we,
Jesus, grant us the grace to desire it.
That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and we may decrease,
Jesus, grant us the grace to desire it.
That others may be chosen and we set aside,
Jesus, grant us the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and we go unnoticed,
Jesus, grant us the grace to desire it.
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
Jesus, grant us the grace to desire it.
That others may become holier than we,
provided that we may become as holy as we should,
Jesus, grant us the grace to desire it.

http://www.ainglkiss.com/prayers/hum.htm

The end of the semester is rapidly approaching and many things have aligned themselves between me and the end. Our semester ends the last week of April and students have left campus before the first day of May. In addition to work, I have a couple of papers and finals awaiting me. After a meeting with the department chair, I have officially learned that I can complete my MDiv by next summer. For those of you keeping score at home - yes, I finished my MA at ACU. In order for a PhD, I needed an MDiv (or to do leveling at if you aren’t paying for it, why not get the sheet of paper). I lack Hebrew (at the undergraduate level), field work (which I will do in conjunction with writing my SLA training sessions this summer), a history course and a christian thought elective (most likely ethics).  It boils down to one course this summer, 2 each semester next year, and one summer (a total of 3 Hebrews).