I’m still in holiday mode for another few days.  Past few days highlights include starting to build a huge front-yard rink for my kids, hanging out with family and friends, a great morning in worship at the Meeting House earlier today and getting ready for Jordan getting his driver’s license tomorrow!

But I’ve been wrestling with a dominant thought to move me personally into 2008 – something to help me make progress as a Jesus-follower.  I’ve boiled it down to one question I think might help me make the most progress.

It sounds so simple, but I think it could help me.  Wonder if it can help you.  I like the question because I think it will help make me better reflect the character of our good God in every relationship I have and become a better decision maker.  I think it could add more grace and yet never make me shy away from the truth.  I think it could be huge for me.

Ready for the question?

Here it is:  In this situation, how can I be for the person in question?

Yep, it’s pretty simple.  But right now in every day life, I think it would help me so much.  See, I know God is for me.  And I know He is for you.  He may need to correct me, change me, prod me, but at every step of the way, He is for me.  And personally, if I know someone is for me,  the journey feels so much better, and during the journey I can endure just about any kind of correction. 

In every conversation, every decision, ever encounter with every person, what If I just asked this question, even if my interaction is going to last seconds or minutes:  in this moment, how can I be for this person? Whether I agree with this person, disagree, like or dislike the dude, appreciate or don’t appreciate the individual, in this transaction, how can I be for them?  Even if I have to disagree or seek a different course than they want, I can still do that being for them, not against them.  I think that could transform me, deeply.

If I really engage that question, I think I could say goodbye to indifference, self-motivated responses, judgment, passive-aggressive behaviours — all the junk.  I could, in Christ’s power, be for that person in that moment, just like God is for us and has been for us forever.

I like that question alot, and think it might really help me.  What about you?

Nice to have a couple of days beneath life’s radar screen and about a week of them left.  We are ‘off’ this Sunday, so no message prep — just some options as to where to worship, which is awesome.  I so need to be a worshiper first, and a preacher second. Lose that priority and you’ve pretty much lost it, period.

Some randomly assembled holiday/rest-induced thoughts:

• Christmas was profound this year.  As we set up the outdoor stage for our Christmas Eve service in the cold and snow, I thought about how Jesus would come to us in such base circumstances.  Thanks God, that you enter our fray way before you ask us to enter your glory.  For more on Christmas Eve at Connexus, check out the Connexus blog.

• Time with family has been great, relaxed and so much fun. Someone generously gave us a hot-tub this summer.  FInally got it up and running after several months of "fine tuning" repairs.  It’s so great to step out into 104 F water when it’s snowing outside,  although my brother-in-law lacerated his legs running in the ice crusted snow.  Nice. I stayed in the tub. 

• Went tobogganing at the same hill I used to go to as a kid.  I’m in better shape than when I was 10.  Also nice.

• On Monday, my 15 year old turns 16 and we’ll run down first thing Monday morning get him his driver’s license, just like my dad did for me on my 16th.  Except then my dad made me drive all the way from Midland to Front and University in Toronto.  Talk about nerve wracking, but I never looked back from there.  Want to go to BC or something Jordan?  You drive!

• Read a brief biography of Andrew Murray and the first five pages of his classic book Humility. Took me several hours to digest five pages, not because they were hard to understand, but because it’s what I deeply need to hear.  Trying to get my head out of human effort and into real, divine power.  I think it comes when we truly lose ourselves, and then find God.  I need so much more of this.   I will continue my slow read, praying God lets it really penetrate my life.

• As a preacher you’re never really "off" unless you can turn your mind and heart off.  Preparing an hour or two a day for H-Bomb, a Connexus series on hypocrisy for January and writing for the Orange Tour coming up in January with early 08 dates in Orlando, Dallas and Charlotte.  It will be great to see you Orange leaders on the road!

• Oh yeah, for Christmas, Toni and the kids got me a mountain bike to replace the one that was stolen from my garage last July.  Sweet.  A Norco Wolverine.  Can’t wait to get back on it in the spring.  Never did find the thief.  The cops said they’re sure it was a neighbourhood teen. So if the thief is a blogger and this is you, let’s chat.  Love to hear your life story : >).

Hope you are having or just had a restful time.  I’ll resurface again sometime in the next seven days.  In the meantime, more of God for each of us, I pray, and for the world.

Hoping all of you have the most amazing Christmas.  I’ve been thinking alot about how to spend the next week or so.  Sure, we’ll have a great service tonight in the snow (I’m so grateful for this opportunity), we’ll have some parties with friends and family, spend a great family day tomorrow and Boxing Day, …but I always see this past week of the year and the first week of the new year as a "reforming" time in my life.  A chance to think, pray and ponder.

What I want most this Christmas, honestly, is a deeper intimacy with Christ.  The fall has been crazy busy, and my soul is feeling like it’s time to drink deeply of God.  I blogged about switching my devotion plan last week, and that’s been refreshing.  But I also deeply want to renew my prayer life.  I want to go to another level — a depth, that maybe I’ve never experienced.  I hope to wake up every day for the next few weeks and begin again with some real prayer…a searching of my soul and God’s heart. 

Before I pick up the next round of management/leadership books that are so popular with us church planting pastors, I’m going to read a classic or two on subjects as weird as humility.

I think if I do this, I’ll be a better man, a better husband, a better father, and maybe even a better pastor and leader.   When I start my days deeply in God, I just do better in life.

So that’s my Christmas holiday.  I hope you get some time this season too, and I really pray you find a rich reward with God as your biggest treasure this season.  Let’s pray for each other.  Not sure how often I’ll surface on the blog over the next week, but I can tell you this, time away with God always makes whatever you want to talk about next actually worth talking about.  All the nonsense is mine — anything worth taking away is God’s.

Wishing you all the best, and every good thing from God…..

I’m kind of excited about having our Christmas Eve outdoors this year.  It’s about as stripped down as we’ve ever done Christmas. We’ll have some staging, lights and a good sound system, great music, hot chocolate, and short and I pray powerful message about forgiveness, but there will be a simplicity to it that intrigues me and draws me in. 

I think in some ways it may better reflect the original Christmas than anything we’ve ever done.  Being outdoors will be somewhat less comfortable than being in a climate controlled building with comfortable chairs.  But then there was nothing climate controlled about the first Christmas.  I love the possibility that people will literally wander in from the streets, not to hear a speaker or listen to a band, but I hope, because something about Jesus compels them.

My wife Toni and I were talking about our service and she said it reminded her of the story of the banquet that Jesus told.  Where many were invited, but in the end, God threw open the doors to the poor, the blind, the crippled and the lame — all those who never felt welcomed before.  Amen.  Bring it on.

I guess I’m asking you to pray with me that God would welcome the unwelcomed this Christmas.  That those of us who know Jesus could host strangers in an open field (park) and let the world know that Jesus really did die for us.  That we climb over snowbanks for a few minutes to share a very real message about an unreal love that came to us.  Sometimes those gatherings are the ones we’ll remember for years, because something happened when we gathered together and God was there.

Two full page ads are running in area newspapers today inviting people to Heritage Park in Barrie Monday evening for our service (6:30 p.m.).  I pray people who really would love to meet Jesus would join Connexus people from all campuses for an incredible celebration of our God in a setting that’s not that far off from the original one.  I think it could be an incredible gathering.

It would be awesome, wouldn’t it, if the world knew what actually happened and what it actually means?  Pray with me, with us, with billions of Christians this weekend, as we all get ready for that.

Hi, I’m Carey.  And I’m a hypocrite.

My words don’t match my action.  My intentions don’t get played out.  I think I’m more virtuous than I am.  And I’m not sure I represent Jesus or the Christian faith well.  Put Jesus beside me, and me beside Him, and see how similar they are.  I shudder to think.

Specifically, I snap at the people I love most – despite my desire not to.  I obey rules selectively, even though I believe as Christians we need to obey the law of the land (I am the king of rolling stops and drive as though the speed limit is 20 km/h higher than it is).  I carry way too many judgmental thoughts. I am desperately selfish, although I understand life comes to us when we give it away.  Has God done merciful things in my life?  No question. Have I been changed?  Absolutely.  But I’m still a hypocrite.

Tomorrow morning, I have a breakfast meeting with some Connexus people to finalize plans for our January 08 series "H-Bomb: Killing the Hypocrite Inside".  I’ve been planning this series for months, and come at it not as one who has mastered hypocrisy, but as one still struggling in recovery. 

I’d love hear from you this week as we head into that meeting and I finish work on the series next week.  Do you struggle in this area?  What are your issues?  You can change your user-id if you want to and post anonymously.  That’s up to you.  But I’d love to hear about your real life struggles.  H-Bomb will try to get to the root of the rot and we’ll spend a few weeks reconstructing our lives in Jesus. 

Hypocrisy is pretty much the #1 things non-Christians can’t stand about Christians. But I am convinced it’s not a Christian problem — it’s a human problem.  How many of your friends co-workers struggle with the "This is what I want and this is what I know is right,  but this is what I do" deal?

So…fire away.  I’m all ears.  And I think you’ll find I have some sympathy.  We’ve all got the disease.

So last month, I changed my devotion plan.  For years, I’ve been reading through the Bible in a year, and I was ready for a change, and I thought I’d switch into a different mode.  My new plan was to read one verse a day and meditate on it, pray about it, and journal on it.

I scrapped it today.

The single-verse meditation plan is said to actually have been invented by Martin Luther, and even though he reformed an entire church using it, I failed to even reform a month of my life.

I picked up my one year bible and felt like I was home.  The readings were from Malachi and Isaiah (not exactly top ten material), but they were like water to a parched soul.

Maybe I’m just not a meditational or deep guy — I don’t know.  All I know is that when I engage God’s Word in real quantity, it speaks to me.  I guess I needed more than a verse.

My point in all this (if I have one) is this:  do you know what devotional plan works best for you?  Have you got a plan? I guess I found out that even though the one-verse thing worked for Luther and many others, it doesn’t really work for me, at least not now.  I need quantity of verse and quantity of time…it helps me connect.  God’s Word honestly rocks my world.  It was so good to read more of it today, especially stuff I have no intention of preaching on at any point in the future.

Nice to connect again God, I missed You.  Despite trying to connect with You.

How’s your fill of God lately?  And do you know what kind of time with God helps you connect the best?

I was kind of blown away this morning when well over 550 people showed up for church in the worst snow storm we’ve seen in about 30 years on a Sunday. I had kind of expected about 8 given the weather.

I was so thrilled when I rolled into the campus parking lot at 6 a.m. and saw it lined with the cars of our e-team members who got up extra early to make it in and set up campus. On both campuses, volunteers and staff worked together to set up environments, and the 8:30 service rolled on as the snow intensified. Ironically, it was our best and smoothest set up yet.

I loved it because I’ve pastored long enough to get my back up about Christians and commitment. Too often, I’ve seen Christians be the first to cancel anything church-like the moment there’s an excuse.  Great weather in the summer, snow in the winter, rain in the fall, or just about any other inticement all keep Christians away from participating in services or church events. You often find them at the rink or the beach an hour after missing the service or event they "just couldn’t get to".  Any pastor knows that.  Do we really serve ourselves in this culture, or do we serve Jesus?

I think I used to be more jazzed about commitment to the "church". These days, the "organization" is secondary to the cause. I am growing more and more passionate about Jesus and what He wants to do with the people we live near.  That’s worth dying for.  (Actually, He did die for that, didn’t He?) What thrilled me today was not just the commitment to the work of Connexus (and trust me, I love Connexus), but their incredible devotion to the cause of Christ.

Frankly, I’m pretty much done with self-absorbed, pampered Christianity.  For the last few decades, we’ve operated churches like we were day spas for Christians — come in, be catered to, hope it spiritually fixes you for a few hours, then back out pretty much unchanged till your next visit.   Too many Christians see the church as being for them, not for Jesus and others.  We run it as a private club that will take any member — as long as we pre-approve the members and they don’t ask us to change anything.  We think salvation will come to us if we save our lives, not if we give them away.  Too many Christians are afraid of the radical kind of commitment and reorientation that Jesus preached or talked about.

Think about it…we quote the thing about Jesus carrying our burdens and giving us rest, or that terribly misquoted passage from Jeremiah about God having plans for "us", but we seldom quote Jesus’ crazy stuff about counting the cost, not having a place to lay his head or needing to prioritize Him even above family.  The devotion Jesus is calling us to is a radical reorientation to life with God at the centre.

And frankly, I don’t think our society is going to be won over by Christians who are in Christianity to see what they can personally get out of it.  Once you’re a follower of Jesus, it stops being about you.  It starts being about Jesus and others. What may influence the world is a radical level of devotion to our God, a sacrificial, others-oriented giving, a totally revamped life that is about serving, not being served.

I think I saw a layer of that today.  I’m thinking about what might happen if those 550 people were unleashed on a world that desperately longs for Jesus…but won’t know what they need till we love them into relationship with our Saviour. Wait…maybe that’s what’s actually beginning to happen.

You up for real followership?  How radically will you realign your life with Jesus in order to make your life no longer about you, but about Jesus and others?

I’d like to chew on that for the week….I certainly haven’t got it figured out.  But I can promise you it intrigues me and makes me want to dig deeper and deeper into it all.

Before I say anything, let me acknowledge that there’s a total irony in what I’m going to say in this post.

I woke up yesterday morning ticked, because I’ve heard a lot of Christians go on and on about how awful the movie The Golden Compass is.   I’m not a fan of the themes of the movie either, and I wouldn’t rush to see it, but I’m wondering why so many Christians feel a need to define themselves by what they are against. 

Some people are still convinced that the world ended when they took prayer out of the public schools.  I was a kid who remembers prayer in the public school system, and as far as I can tell, mumbling the Lord’s prayer on school day mornings never saved anybody.  Frankly, it used to embarrass me as a grade-school Christian because I felt like something we should offer to God voluntarily was being forced on everyone.  I felt like maybe because the church was doing such a poor job at being the church we expected the government to pick up the slack.

Sometimes I wonder if all our lobbying of governments and culture is really just a mask over how weak and anemic we might actually be as modern day Christians.  If the church loved…if the church was grace-filled….if the church was relevant…if the church was irresistible… would we need to slam governments, school boards and Hollywood nearly as much as we do?

Why should we expect people who are not Christians to be Christians?  Why should we expect an atheist to be "Christian" when he writes a screen play, or a school board made up of mostly non-believers to do the work of a the church?  Jesus spent zero percent of his time lobbying the government to change laws, and 100% of his time changing people’s lives personally.  Shouldn’t we be the same? 

I would so much rather that Christians were known for what we are for than what we are against. Instead of hating the world, why don’t we lay down our lives for the world in love? Do we honestly think Hollywood is a step closer to mass-conversion to Christianity because Christians told them they were wrong — again?

So there’s my irony…I guess I’m against Christians being against things.  Okay.  But I’d rather make my life about what I’m for.  I’m for love.  I’m for Jesus.  I’m for hope.  I’m for grace.  I’m for truth.  I’m for life.  I want Connexus to be about what we are for.

What do you think?

We all fall into habits. 

When something new enters my life, I usually have a period of a few days where I establish some learnings on how to use it. And within those first 48 to 72 hours, I form patterns that soon become indicative of how I’ll interact with whatever I’m using.  For example, I bought this laptop back in August, and it is my first Mac.  Initially, everything seemed new.  But for the most part, I figured out how to use it in the first 72 hours.  It was like I made little deals on what keystroke shortcuts I’d use, what features I’d open, and what I’d never bother to figure out.

In those first few days, I didn’t explore every feature or probably even 90% of what this baby can do.  I just figured out how to use it for what I needed it to do, explored a few bells and whistles, and left it alone.  And what I did in those first few days set the pattern for my use of this thing since then.  Even though I totally love my Mac (I’m a raving fan!), I’ve explored two raindrops worth of ocean so far.

The same is true of how I’d explore a new cell phone…set patterns in new relationships….even how I’m approaching the new patterns of how to preach at Connexus with video and very steeply raked seating…in the first few days of using something new, I set a pattern that I pretty much follow without much deviation from thereon in.

Think about your own patterns.  Do you see a trend like that?

The pattern may be natural, but what it leaves me with is probably using a small percentage of the power of whatever I’m dealing with, like this laptop.  I think the same thing is true of so much in life, including my spiritual life.  Have I fallen into a place where I’m discovering .1% of God, only because my approach to God was set years ago and hasn’t varied much?  What would I do differently if I really explored Him, really got to know Him differently and fully?

What about your relationship with God?  Have you fallen into patterns that you know limit you to exploring a fraction of God?  Just asking.  But I think I’d like to chew on that personally for a few days.

By the way, later this week, I’m going to sit down with a fellow staffer and she’s going to teach me how to use some software I’ve always ignored over all these years of computing.  That should be fun.

And maybe…maybe…I’ll even talk to God about exploring Him far more creatively and fully too.

It’s so easy in a culture that is always on to the next and greatest to wonder what happens next.  I know I have that default to my personality.  While that kind of characteristic can produce great things, it can also be a bit unhelpful. 

I ask the question in light of the fact that by the grace of God, we’ve launched two campuses for Connexus in the last two weeks.  It’s been an amazing journey — one we’ve seen the hand of God in over and over again.  We’re so grateful.  But even as we celebrate these launches, people are saying "where’s your next campus?"  Naturally I answer
that we have plans for Muskoka and even Toronto, but right now I feel
like there is so much still do to here.

I think what’s next for us is taking something that is really quite good (our two campuses as they open), and that we’re thrilled with to start, and making them better and better week by week.  Not only do we need to get a few bugs out of the system (people have been so gracious), but even after we reach a level at which we feel "satisfied", there is so much more to do.

Ultimately, we want to make every environment we run all it can be.  Community groups change lives as people intersect with God and each other.  So does Waumba Land, our infant environment.  We want those environments — and all the ones we run — to be leveraged in the best way possible to help people grow in their relationship with God.  Rather than being generalists — trying to do a whole lot — we want to be specialists, choosing a few things and doing them optimally.

As we tweak each environment, make what we do better and more conducive to God’s work and to life-change, we’ll see more and more people realize how simple it is to have a real relationship with God. 

What things are you already doing this week in your life that with a little prayer and attention, can go from simply being good, to being great?   And how would your life be used by God if things truly went from being very good, to realizing their full potential?