2/17/08

arrived in Sacramento. Have my guitar . . . an architect turned Christian guitarist traveling by plane, train, and automobile. A little weird.

It feels like I'm on this weird journey. God, where are you taking me? I thought I was supposed to go to VE and now I'm back in CA, in Sacramento. the land of Arnold Swarzneger, and liberal poilitics. In a train station - actually much better in a Starbucks, next to the train station.

These are places where people come and go, where nobody stays for very long.

I still don't have a good sense where my father "is". It seems as though this journey he is on is the last road of his travels. Tumultuous indeed. Like the story of his life.

I've certainly been greatly sentimental and melancholy. I've been going over segments of my life: the kids when they were younger, the time we lived on Walsh rd., the end of the 20th century in my life ceratinly marks something rather significant - the most significant in fact to date.

I've been lately drawn listening to much speaking on apologetics. I've speculated that I'm wanting be able to communicate a more articulate explanation of "the reason for my faith". I've discovered that apologetics is way more than that. So, in my "ministry" (this is the first time that I can recall such a reference), I find the need for the deeper roots, as if to know the soil in which faith is grounded. I will always express of my faith based on personal experience, and the incredible gift I've received. And that this gift is avialable to all that wishes new life. Life like we were meant to have on this earth and life not of this earth. Yet, it is not all touchy-feely. It is difficult, it IS tumultuous.

I watched a short clip by a guy named Mark Driscoll, a pastor I yet don't know anything about. His call to men as soldiers, as Paul encourages Timothy, that it is a battleground not for us to be winners, but for us to be instruments for the love a Jesus Christ. It is not flower child, all is well with the world, do not offend religion, but warfare of the most crucial kind.

So, it has occured to me that my sudden change in orders from my leader, my one and only master, my Lord, is a mission unfinished, or a mission yet to be done - it is easy to assume it is my father . . . and it could be, but it may besomeone else - or others. In the mean-time I havce certainly wondered if my Lord had also decided that I wasnlt ready for the mission originally planned. that I was going down with my own agenda, my own mission, not his. Was I being impatient, wanting to do what I want to do - worse yet, not be inthe proper place to mission this trip needed to be "missioned"?

I continue to examine what we mean when we say mission. It is certainly meant with only the best of intentions. Yet, it is not a mission as in a task to be accomplished, but a series of actions under devine orders that are part of His larger contimuum of events. We are players in these events. Motivated by the Holy Spirit, our free will maximizes the opportunity for the true expression of love and thus we "act with love".

So why I am I so drawn to other cultures. An Indian couple sits near me and I smile. They seem to be in love with each other, and their broken english tells me that they weren't born here. It reminded me of a movie MaryEllen and I saw about a young Indian couple who emigrated to the U.S. and the challenging cultural adjustments required. SO WHAT? Well, it is this precise understanding of how cultures can be so different that we tend not to understand, but worse care not to understand or appreciate. I'm drawn to the innocence, the bravery, the fortitude, and the desire to be in another's culture. I too am drawn to be in another's culture - for one because it gives me a better persepective of understanding people from different cultures. And we are ALL God's people. We should maybe know each other a little better. Okay, maybe I don;t know what it really is. Maybe because I can identify in the smallest of ways having been born in the Philippines, lived in Japan and had always been around internationals all of my childhood?

I see Paul as the ultimate mission man . . . or friend of man(?) - (reference to a the notion that we should be trying to befriend those that we mission to - not go to with a mission like a cowboy).

And what of church planting? Not now.