Lamp Lit Learnings

It's raining this morning.  Not a typical California rain, but an actual steady cloud that sends the constant drizzle.  It reminds me of Portland.  I love days like today.  It makes me think of friends that I love and memories that I cherish.  This morning though it makes me thoughtful for the future instead of the past. Our departure for San Jose is about six months away.  Right now, in this moment, it seems so far away.  I think about our team (and our prospective team) and I desire to worship with them now.  I want to have them in our home, to share in communion with them and to sing songs of praise with them.  I want to listen to stories of people they have met and shared the name of Jesus with. I want to share a meal together.  I want to be real. We've made the announcement at our home church.  We wrote about our plans in our Christmas letter and mailed it to almost 400 people a few days ago.  People have started to make c...

Today is a big day for us.  In about an hour we will drive two hours away to meet with the elders and a few members from a possible sponsoring or partnering church.  It's big for two reasons. Relationship .  I believe that in Church planting you must have a relationship with an older established church for balance.  Since the relationship with our current church did not evolve into our partnering church it is very important to me that we connect with another established church that we already know some of the members.  We have that kind of relationship with this church.  They are AMAZING people and they are fired up and ready for planting churches.  They know that the church that plants will be encouraged and changed as much as the lives of those reached by the planters.  I pray that God has been organizing this relationship for years and we are about to see it come to a beautiful depth in the next few years. Security .  There's no doubt ...

November 1st, 2012 It's a day that will be remembered in my mind for the rest of my life.  It's the day that my husband looked across the table on our date night and asked me, "Are you ready?" Thinking he meant to order I answered a simple "Yes."  His response?   "Okay, then let's go plant a Church." And so, here we go.  After years of praying, lots of heart breaking conversations, more than a few tears, and months of pent up excitement we are ready to put our feet to the fire and charge down this road of church planting full steam ahead!  The people of San Jose are waiting, lost souls longing for something that they don't know will fill their hunger.  That God would choose to use us in this way is humbling!

I am lonely. It's not like I don't have any friends.  I do, I have some really good friends. I have a best friend that I never talk to because we are both too busy with life and ministry and families. I have a bunch of mommy friends that I see occasionally. I have a friend that I see three times a week, but it's in passing and we don't share a depth of relationship that I wish we could. I have ministry friends that I get to see once or twice a year. I have an amazing husband who is the greatest friend I could ask for, but in all this I'm lonely. We began this journey toward church planting in March of 2010. (Though in reality it began so much longer ago than that.)  It seems as though God has given us the "slow track" rather than the "fast pass" that He has offered some others.  You see, many church planters feel a sense of urgency and it requires them to take immediate action which means leaving jobs, family, friends and sometimes moving...

When you dream and you dream big it takes a lot of courage.   When we went to Discovery Lab (April 2010), and then to Strategy Lab (September 2011) with the Kairos Church Planting Network it was with two goals in mind.  First, my husband and I believe in Church planting and we want to be a part of supporting it in a big way.  Second, we want our home church to be a church planting church.  We dreamed big partly because we had the backing of a relationship built over 14 years of ministry with this church.  We thought that together we could do great things for God's Kingdom.  Not once in our years of dreaming did we ever picture heading out on this adventure of church planting without our home church.  So when the recent turn of events changed our foundation we were left with half of a dream and a lot of questions.  Primarily " Where do we go from here?" Half of a dream is not much of a dream at all... or so it seems. While on one hand ...

I'm not naive, at least not in the sense that church planting is going to be difficult.   I know it will be one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.  I just didn't expect the hard part to be up front. I've been at a church for 11 years, living, loving and sharing in fellowship with this church body.  For me it seems a natural conclusion then that when we decided to go plant a new church, that this family here would send us out.  And not just support us financially, but rather send us out with shouts of joy and blessing over our new work.  As we converse with the leadership it seems that may not be the case and that pains me.  It causes anxiety like I've never known.  It is effecting me physically and emotionally.  You see when I think about church planting I fully expect heartache when those who don't know Christ decide to reject truth.  I didn't expect heartache when those who have known Christ their entire adult lives dec...

I'm a very emotional person. To me there's nothing like a good cry.  When my husband and I took a systematic theology class together the first day was overwhelming.  It was so much information to process with ideas I'd never considered before. When we were done with that day of class I just wanted to cry.  It's how I deal with a lot of things.  If I'm happy, I cry.  If I'm sad, I cry.  If I'm frustrated, I cry.  If I'm overwhelmed, overjoyed, or over the moon, I cry!  It's who I am and who God created me to be. All my life I've attended church and it's the one place where my emotion seems "out of place".  This morning as I was doing the dishes choking back tears as I sang along to a worship song on the speakers, I pondered why we shut the emotion out of Church. There are times that I sit in Church completely overwhelmed by the consuming love of my Savior.  Tears burn  my eyes when I allow myself to grasp at understanding His lo...

Have you ever run away from home? Not like the real kind of run away, but the "I don't agree with my parents and they make me so mad that I want to run away" kind of run away. I did. I don't remember how old I was, but I was old enough to know my way around and to know better than to do what I did.  I don't remember what the argument was about.  Probably something silly like cleaning my room, the type of music I listen to, or an all to common one in my relationship with my parents, a disrespectful attitude.  Whatever it was, I was mad.  I tossed a few things in my back pack and rode off on my bike without telling anyone where I was going.  I remember it was evening, and the sun was sinking low as I rode off toward the airport road.  This was in the days before cell phones so I'm sure when they realized I was gone it was quite frightening for my parents.  Of course in my mind at the time I pictured them not caring at all.  As I rode, I...

Where to plant? If this were a question of gardening, I would have easy answers such as "in direct sunlight", or "partial shade".  But it's not, and I don't have any easy answers.  In fact they are too difficult to comprehend.  You see we have so many factors to figure in. We need to balance the needs of our family as well as the needs of the people around us. We need to figure in the sponsoring church and where we might be most successful.  These are not easy things to figure out. One survey trip and I already feel a little more secure in the decision.  Each time we narrow it down some it makes me feel a bit more at ease.  You see, I can create a "home" anywhere, I just need to know where that is in order to let my mind adjust to it ahead of time. The other day my oldest missionary came to me asking why we had not built a chicken coop in our back yard yet.  I explained to her that we would eventually be moving so there was no point to star...