mongolian barbecue and our life story

Last night's Easter practice went great. I was honestly worried about it. Our Praise Chorus is doing the song "Your Grace Still Amazes Me" with a special video. Last week, things didn't sound so hot...but what an imporvement. North Central is blessed to have some wonderfully talented people. I'm looking forward to a great Easter!

I picked up a new book today to read during all my free time between preparing for Easter services, overseeing the A/V at this year’s LTC convention, leading praise and worship for the big LTC Celebration, and transferring hours of video footage to DVD. It seems that at moments like these, when life is most hectic is when I start to get introspective. Why is that? Seems like poor timing to me.

Anyway, the book is “To Be Told: know your story, shape your future” by Dan Allender. This whole idea of our lives as narrative has been on my mind lately. We are looking at Elevate summer camp to deal with this; but a lot of my interest is personal. For the last few months I’ve been wondering where my story is going. So many strange things (circumstances) have presented themselves. I tend to shy away from reading too much into life circumstances, but man, sometimes it’s hard to ignore. But here’s the problem with circumstances, just when we think God is penning a new chapter in our lives, something happens that makes you question the whole process. We think, “Perhaps I was way off, this circumstance was actually God setting the stage for the next scene.” And so we launch off, thinking we now understand the scene; but in reality, we don’t. We only know the scene we’re currently in. And some of us don’t even know that. So what to do? For guys like me who think in terms of what will be, (i.e. vision) not knowing what the heck is going on is tough. You keep throwing ingredients into the mix, and hope it doesn’t come out crap. I guess that’s where the faith comes in. Faith that God knows what’s going on. He knows just what ingredients are needed to have your life tasting just the way He intended. Sort of like the restaurant, Mongolian Barbecue. If you’ve never been, basically you pick your own ingredients, and they cook them on this huge grill in the center of the room. They have recipe cards that tell you just how much of each meat, spice, vegetable, etc. you need to put in. That’s what I do…grab a card and follow in the instructions. I have no idea about food. I don’t know what 90% of the stuff is that the card tells me to put in. Most of I’ve never heard of, or if I have, it’s something I normally wouldn’t eat. But I follow the card anyway. The grill guy cooks it, and you know what, it tastes good. I trust someone whom I’ve never met who wrote out a recipe on a little card that my $10 meal, full of stuff I don’t like is gonna taste good. It should be easier to trust that my Lord, who loves me beyond belief, knows my hearts desires, knows my strengths, my weakness, my insecurities…my taste buds, can take all my life’s characters, triumphs, tragedies, and circumstances and come out with the life I was made for. I know in my heart, in the end, as long as I put one foot in front of the other, reaching out for Jesus, my life is gonna be all that I could ask for and more than I could ever imagine.

oh, yeah...if you read this blog, post a comment and let me know. I keep hearing from different people when I don't post for awhile, but was honestly unaware that anyone but my mother-in-law actually reads it :-) Feel free to comment, I'd love to hear from you.

I don't know if I'll get to write much this weekend. I leave tonight for LTC and then will be pretty busy with that. If you're in the area, stop by the Marriot on Saturday evening. We'll have a great time of worship. Autumn from Rochester College is gonna serve as the Praise Team. Or better yet, stop by during the day and check out the kids use their gifts to glorify God.