What really matters...

After I finished yesterday's post I was still thinking about what I had written and I realized something: when I pray and ask for God's help, I want God to give me the tools that I need to do what I think I need to do on my own. See I am a very independent person, I have been since I was a very young child. So asking for help has never been something I'm really good at. I like to think I can do things on my own. So even when I ask for help, I want that help to be able to do it on my own. But I think God is telling me that there is plenty of help around me, I just have to ask for it from the people around me. Letting go of control. Not such an easy thing to do - any way you cut it.

When I was Atlanta, one of the booths I stopped at in the convention center gave me a copy of Jeremy Camp's book, I Still Believe . I was struggling with some stuff last night and saw the book as I was looking for something else, and decided to start reading it. Jeremy's life is a powerful story. The first part of the book is about his childhood and then his first wife Melissa who died not long after they got married from a quick and severe form of cancer. Then the book goes into Jeremy's life after Melissa's death, the grief and how he processed it, and his music career taking off, and also meeting his second wife Adie. But the part that struck me is after all of this happens, and Jeremy is writing about control in ministry. It is a danger of being in ministry - when the work you are doing is a product of faith, it can become more about the work than about the Lord. I think I did that. I think I got to the point where I was doing the work for the Lord, rather th

So I have been having a number of conversations recently with people about things that I heard and experienced in Atlanta, books that I am now reading or preparing to read, and just thoughts that have been coming up for me as a result of these things. There is too much to sit down and write it all in one sitting, but I would like to write a brief reflection on the first 4 chapters of the book I am currently reading, You Lost Me, by David Kinnaman. You Lost Me is a book about "why young Christians are leaving the church...and rethinking faith." (that's actually the subtitle). I am finding it a really interesting read. So far the book has been about the dropout problem as it relates to young adults and who these "dropouts" are. There is so much I could write about this phenomenon, obviously as Kinnaman wrote 4 chapters about it. But what I want to talk about is the three categories young adults who leave the church tend to fall into - Nomads, Prodigals, and