I’m sitting here in my living room on a lazy Saturday morning (thank God for lazy Saturday mornings) thinking someone parked a snow-making machine in the sky above my house and plugged it in. I’m not complaining…it is so gorgeous.  Postcard material. If you click on the image, it will open in a bigger window, and you can see how beautiful it is and how lousy my photography is.

I’m thinking God must be so creative, and so delighted at small details of beauty.  Things really do look so much more beautiful covered in snow.

I was thinking today how everything looks so bleak in November.  Grey, dead, lifeless.  And then God covers the lifeless things with something so spectacular.  A blue December sky and bright day after a snow fall almost has no equal in beauty.  And even a soft snow just-below-freezing morning like this is gorgeous.

Our lives are like that, aren’t they?  When things are bleak and desperate, even lifeless, God can still send remarkable beauty into it.

I’m so glad Christmas lands in snow season.  It’s appropriate, theologically.  I’m so excited about Christmas this year.  (If you are looking for great Christmas music this year, Sarah McLaughlin’s WinterSong from last year and Reliant K’s brilliant and hilarious Let it Snow Baby, Let it Reindeer are fueling my holiday spirit.)

But none of it takes away from the sheer beauty of it all.  Enjoy the snow.  And if you are one of the bloggers from the south reading this, pray for a blizzard.  It’s good for your soul.

So this weekend, both campuses of Connexus are wide open to everyone.  I’m so excited that Orillia is publicly launching this weekend.  It’s our prayer, our hope, our goal, that scads of people who had given up on God or on church and reams of people who have never explored either will flood into Orillia and Barrie.

If you think about it, that will be kind of amazing.  What will that be like?  I know many of you have invited friends, and you probably know them well enough to know that many of them have unusual ideas about God and, like the rest of us, lots to learn.  Historically, Christians can even get uptight about new people "learning" how to behave in front of God quickly.  Not sure God is nearly as concerned as we are.

Jesus called God "Abba" — a term that pretty much
means ‘daddy’, and invited us into the same intimate relationship with God that He had — a relationship all of us were actually designed for.  He also said that if were to really get the Kingdom of God thing, we would have to become like little children. 

I was reminded of all this recently when I encountered a charming little four year old named Kayla.  Kayla is the daughter of one of our elders and his wife who have offered their home (a very nice basement) to our staff as a temporary HQ.  Kayla wanders down once in a while and she’s started visiting me regularly.

Last week, when I was sick, she took her costume box out and decided it would be great to dress me up.  I had all kinds of tiaras, purple silk fabric and dresses thrown all over me.  She thought it was quite cute.  I was too queasy to fight back.  The staff snapped pictures with their cell phones and will sell the photos to you at inflated prices.  (Talk to them.)

What amazed me is that she had no fear.  She just thought it was perfectly normal. 

She came in again the other day and asked me if I could see anything because my glasses were off.  I jokingly told her I couldn’t see anything at all.  She didn’t miss a beat and said she’d clean them.  She licked her fingers and started wiping the lenses and then simply stuck out her tongue and gave them a total wipedown (good thing for her I keep them clean).  I thanked her.

What I was amazed by was her calm boldness, and the wonderfully innocent sense she had that all she was doing was very appropriate.  I realize how fragile that kind of trust is in this world, and valued it deeply.

I wonder if sometimes God wants us to come to Him like a little child — wide eyed, opened, trusting and happy to be in His presence.  The behaviour may not always be "socially acceptable" — but thank God for that. 

There are hundreds of people ready to get into some kind of a relationship with God this weekend. They’ll be wondering whether they’ve "got it right" and whether it’s even "okay" to be there.  I think we just need to send the message that absolutely it’s okay to be there, and encourage them to explore God and approach Him unashamedly, even if they get a few things "wrong" in our eyes.  We need to keep the kind of environment open where fundamentally all of us can enter into a direct, personal, trusting relationship with our heavenly Father through Jesus.  A little bit like a four year old did with me over the last month.

God is our Abba, our daddy.  And we can come to Him like little children.  Somehow, I think that kind of innocent and wide eyed trust really pleases God.  This weekend, bring it on!  Invite everyone you can – and yourself – into it!

I’ve been thinking/talking a lot with leaders lately about the power of a unified vision and mission.  At the lead pastor’s retreat for the North Point lead pastors a few weeks ago, Andy Stanley talked to us about how hard it can be to lead a team when competing agendas are at work.

It’s not just a church principle…it’s a life principle. Try being married when spouses are working at crossed purposes, or running a company when two partners want to go one way and two want to go another.  Try a going on a family vacation when half the family wanted to go skiing at Whistler and the other half is bound and determined to go to Disney World.   You just set yourself up for failure.

I love what I see at Connexus as a team of leaders, elders, staff and volunteers are gathering together around a common mission to lead people into a growing relationship through Jesus Christ by creating relevant environments.  What’s even more powerful is that this team is committed to a common strategy.  We are actually going to do very few things as a church.  No pot lucks, no socials, no infinite stream of ministries running off in 80 directions, no fundraising bake sales, nothing to distract us from our core mission.  We all only have so much energy, time and resources to give, so why not align them — streamline them — around a core mission and strategy that seeks to create a few relevant environments in which life change can happen best?

The impact of a streamlined strategy designed at leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus is that somehow all of our efforts get maximized.  Rather than spending sixteen hours arguing about whether to go to Whistler or Disney, you can actually use that time and energy in a positive direction by choosing a location and working together to make the experience as engaging and rewarding as possible.  That’s what I see every Sunday as e-team members arrive before 6 a.m. to pour their hearts into what we’re going to do.  That’s what I know we’ll see next month as dozens of volunteers and hopefully many of you gather together at Group Link to pursue life in community groups together.  That’s what we see when people pour their hearts into family ministry that we pray, over time,  will become second to none in this country, with relevant environments for students, children and infants and a strategy to equip their parents for the task of spiritually and morally forming their kids.

You can do a lot when you are on a mission, together. 

What excites you most about having a definite strategy and then going for broke trying to implement it with excellence?

This has been a pretty amazing season.  It has been actually quite challenging to launch two campuses in a very short time frame and begin ministry all over again from scratch.

But it will actually be hard for me to describe how encouraged I’ve felt these last few months.  Even as we went through some very difficult passages, the overwhelming feeling of encouragement has been remarkable.

Let me cut right through to the heart of it.  I honestly don’t think a day has gone by in the last two months in which someone has failed to send an encouraging email, note or post on the blog. I’ve gotten hundreds of emails, dozens of cards, scads of blog comments and facebook messages that are variations of "this is amazing…keep going…God is moving…thanks for stepping out in faith…." 

I have been amazed at how much these encouraging words have fueled not just me, but our whole team.

I think we underestimate how discouraging life can be…how empty it can feel when you feel all alone…cut off from community…isolated.  And I think we underestimate how much a word of encouragement can put the wind back in just about everybody’s sails.

In so many ways, when we encourage each other, we reflect God’s fundamental disposition toward us.  He made a decision a long time ago that He would be for us.  When God was free to choose to cut us off and leave us alone, in love He came in Jesus and decided He would make a way for us to cut through this mess and find Him and find each other.  God is for us.  God is an encourager.

None of this means we won’t have tough moments, hard conversations, even painful decisions to make. These are a part of life and a part of our relationship with God – our faith walk. But when you can make them in an atmosphere of love, kindness, respect and support, somehow everything changes.  Probably the thing I like most about Connexus these days is that I see this community and the broader community we’re a part of operating in a sphere of encouragement, of support, of love.

God is for you and me today.  That’s a pretty powerful thought.  Is there someone you might encourage today? Because having been encouraged by God Himself, it would be a shame to keep that to ourselves.

I have had this overwhelming prompting over the last few months.  Maybe that’s not the right word…prompting…voice…urging….sensation.  I don’t know what to call it.  I think it might be from God.  And if not, I think at least it’s a good idea (Too many people blame their bad ideas on God…not fair.  So I say ‘I only think it might be from God.’ That way it’s my fault if it really is a terrible idea).

Anyway, as we launched Connexus Barrie yesterday and I saw a full house at 10 despite a bad blizzard going on — many of whom were people I’ve never met before — I just got gripped with this prompting, again.

Even as I preached, I just wanted to bring it to the forefront.

Here’s the prompting, the idea:  if we could just get out of the way, and let people actually meet Jesus for who He really is, people would line up in droves to get into relationship with Jesus.  The biggest obstacle to people entering into a growing relationship is….us. Christians. The church.  We’ve taken what was supposed to be easy, and made it hard.  We’ve taken a clear message and obscured it.  We’ve taken relevance and so fogged it up it seems totally irrelevant to people.

I have this idea that if our environments are biblical, connect culturally, and simply facilitate an authentic encounter between God and His people — and people as a result actually see God’s real heart — they’ll stampede in.

Because what we really line up for in life, is love.  No one lines up to be judged, to be rejected, to be found wanting, to be cursed, or to be despised.  Sadly, many people think is how God feels toward them.  Truthfully, that’s how Christians have sometimes been toward people…but it actually has nothing to do with God.  God is for people.  Jesus is for people.

Man, if we could just get that message out.  If our environments (our Sunday adult services, kids ministry, community groups and more), were culturally relevant places of love, grace and acceptance, and people saw who God really was and got into Him personally….people would line up to meet Jesus.

Frankly, for me, this really has nothing to do with growing a church (the logistics of becoming bigger and opening more campuses are just too overwhelming right now, as we launch two campuses in two weeks), and everything to do with connecting people to God in Jesus.

Isn’t that what it’s all about?

My job, more and more, is to get out of the way and facilitate that encounter — pray for that encounter — enable that encounter.

Could you imagine if that happened?  If people met Jesus?  Just think about it….

Seriously.  I think we could be a church that did that.