Missional Explorer

New Hobbies and Friends

As I reflect on the past few years, another way I now sense that changes are afoot is how/where I spend my time.  For a number of months, I have taken great joy in learning about wine, wine varietals, the countries where wine is produced, best value wines, etc.  My learning curve was steep but I sure enjoyed the ride.  Now that I have a basic understanding of wine, I am spending far less time on this hobby having settled on what we like and the locations where we can find the best wine for the best value.  

While I am spending less time on hobbies such as wine and book collecting, I am spending more time on a relatively new awareness that, with the end to our chapter on "raising kids" fast approaching, I now realize that I/we have relatively few peer friends to show for the past 20 years.  I know that our story is not unique and that "friends" often take a back seat to "family" in the child-raising years.  But as our kids are now older and leaving the home, I have a yearning for a community of friends that I did not feelin the hectic and whirlwind days of raising our kids.   As I truly believe that God puts "desires" in our heart, I will be most interested to see how he intends to meet our community and friendship desire in the days ahead.

Now and Then

As we begin our 19th year at Jim Elliot School, Linda and I have been reflecting on where we've been, where we are, and where God may be taking us in the next few years.  When I interviewed with JES in the summer of 1991, I would never in a million years have imagined that I would still be heavily involved in the school almost 20 years later.  What a fascinating chapter in my/our life story.  Yet we have also been facing the reality that, with Adam graduated in 2008, Robby now a senior and Michael a sophomore, we might be seeing the outlines of some entirely new chapters over the next 3 years.

Don't get me wrong.  I am still wildly fascinated with the "missions" to "missional" paradigm shift which continues to rock our world.  And I can't help but think that our journey in this direction will continue to impact our lives in the years ahead.  But beyond being missional explorers, Linda and I are wondering what else is going describe our lives "after kids". I can vaguely sense what may lie ahead but only in wonderings and shadows.

While much is very unknown and I still want to run the race fully engaged at JES, I do sense changes in where I find joy and what is important to me.  For example, after a lifetime of loving books and devouring whatever is the "cutting edge" of theological wanderings, I have realized in recent months that books are not nearly as important to me as they used to be. . . and I can see the day when I will be hopefully cutting my considerable book collection in half or more.  I still love books but my appetite for theory has been severely diminished in favor of books that are truly transformational in real-life practical ways.  If you have followed this blog since I began writing in 2006, you might be able to sense this shift in recent months as well. . . which I am only now beginning to "name" myself.  For a long time, I couldn't put my finger on why I had little interest in blogging.  Now I think its because of this gradual change in my tolerances and appetites for more real-life engagement and less theory if/when there seems to be no practical point. 

I think I'll blog on this a bit over the next few days.  I'm sure that many of you have already found that there is no cookbook approach to life and no classes one can take to prepare for new chapters ahead. Linda and I have been wondering why we feel so strangely unsettled these days and I think this is part of it.  Our lives are changing.  Things we used to think were important are certainly becoming less important yet what is going to be important in the future is not yet fully known.   20 years is a long time in one's life.  How invigorating and mysterious it is to realize that the next 20 years may look very different than the past 20 years have been.    

New Adventures

Last week I started my 18th year of teaching at Jim Elliot School.    As we like to say at JES, "the train never stops" which forces most of us to take a leap onto a moving train trusting that we will land somewhere in one piece.  I want to mention two recent developments however.  One is that ACSI has just released the curriculum entitled Missio Dei which I researched for a year while in living New Zealand in 2006.  After carefully reviewing the final product, I think that ACSI did a masterful job of capturing the spirit and creativity of what God is doing in our world.  You can check it out at http://www.purposefuldesign.com/Textbooks/tabid/54/List/0/CategoryID/0/Level/a/Language/en-US/Default.aspx?SortField=EAN%2cProductNumber&txtSearch=Missio+Dei

The other conversation which I find myself tiptoeing back into is the whole issue of nationalism in the United States, an incredibly controversial topic to unpack in the U.S. Christian community.  Like missionality, I find myself drawn to this conversation because, even after 18 years, I still don't know how to dance this dance without getting fired.  I still use bits of Lee Camp but am at a loss to know anything else that will take the issue on and still leave me standing.  Any suggestions?