Giving, Blessings, and Abundance

I am posting this approximately 4 months after I originally wrote it. This begs the question of: why now? Answer: I just wasn't ready to put this out there yet, it didn't seem like the right time.

Now, I feel it is the "right time". It speaks to why I am at Journey and working towards ordination. It speaks to those that might feel that Journey has lost something as we have struggled to get our Warehouse remodel completed. It speaks to being in the desert and how our faith nourishes us. It speaks to abundance that is present, even when we don't know or believe it!


I sit here thinking about the talk that my wife Stephanie and I will give this Sunday to our fledgling little faith community about giving. How do you communicate in terms that reach each of those folks sitting out there? How can you tell them how blessed we all are if they don't already know it.

Do you tell them the story of being in a horrific boating accident and having one of the EMS responders pull a sheet over your head. How, for what seemed like hours, you ponder the idea that you are dead and trying to decide if it is true. Then thinking how does one decide if you have never been dead. Ultimately you decide to yell, "I'm not dead yet!" to see what happens. Do you tell them that from that day forward you decided to live every day like it was your last and how blessed those days have been. How that moment led to working at all levels of Habitat for Humanity. To seeing miracles in people lives through the selfless giving of volunteers. Some of which had almost nothing but the desire to help their fellow man.

Do I tell them that I believe that I am blessed with abundance even though we went through bankruptcy last year? That we lost our house because the city of Pearland decided to build a major road right behind our house. How do I make them understand that even with this, we are blessed.

How else would we have come back to Austin, to have our beautiful son Ryan, to help start Journey, to be with our aging parents, to start the path towards ordination? How would my wife have started her own Music Therapy practice and touch the lives of so many people in need?

The answer is that God has immersed us in abundance. Let's be clear that we are talking about far more than money! In our case, money is a small part of God's abundance. Abundance is the time he gives me to lead the Warehouse remodel, the bountiful time to spend with our kids, the time to work with non-profits working in our community, the gift he gives Stephanie to work with traumatically brain-injured patients who learn to walk or talk again and regain some semblence of a normal life, the talent to play her flute and bring joy to so many people.

So are we the only ones that are this blessed? Of course not! Everyone has been blessed in many ways and can bring those God given talents and blessings to help others. To be the servant of those around us and thus to be a leader in our servitude. To remove our expectations and fear and to truly join God in his amazing works being done all around us. When we do this, we have truly embraced his abundance. Without need, there is no fear. Without fear, there is the room to embrace each other - Love. God knows this and is just waiting for us to join him. I am all in, how about you?

Blessings and good night!

TIme to get blogging

Ok, so I know that I said that I was going to write myself to an answer a couple of weeks ago and I haven't made a single entry since then. I could blame it on the deep level of thought that I was achieving driving back and forth to Houston to do business or I could blame it on my wife's family reunion taking up a huge amount of time, but I won't do that.

I am just going to say that everything happens in perfection and the perfect time to start writing again is right now. That’s my story and I am sticking to it! Ok, so here we go.

I left off last time talking about how I seem to have this thing in my head that I just can't get rid of. The "thing" is an ongoing dialogue about how the business side of my brain is trying to integrate or adapt to the faith side. They have done it before and they have just forgotten some of the incredible experiences that I had 5 - 10 years ago at Austin Habitat for Humanity.

So you ask, what was it you experienced? I am glad you asked. I repeatedly saw God's hand at work. We would be banging our head against the wall about money, volunteers, time, schedule, etc and would finally give it to God. What do you know, but the right thing that needed to happen would and we could move forward. I think you could boil it down to this "If you try to will it to happen it won't and just when you think it won't happen and give it to God, it will".

This is where the faith comes in. We were looking for very specific results instead of having faith that God would provide the abundance we needed. This is exactly where my business brain goes crazy. In fact, this is where most of my business friends of faith get out of the boat. They (and me from time to time) just find it excruciatingly hard to wait. Waiting means a lot of things when you really look at it:

1. How do you wait when the plan and schedule say you are going to have X done by a certain date. Answer: Maybe you shouldn’t have the schedule say that.
2. How do you run a business, church, anything based on the concept that one does what one can and continues to listen to God to see how he is working in the organization. Answer: The problem here is that God doesn't publish a Microsoft Project Plan and a PowerPoint as an overview to his plan. We have to have the faith and patience to watch it unfold. Man is that a pain in the ass for us that have grown up in corporate America.
3. Does that mean we don’t plan at all? Of course not, we have to plan and execute with the expectation that things will change and we have to just roll with the abundance. Note that I didn’t say punches. I am choosing to think that God is going to pull is in the right direction versus shove us.

Now we have something to chew on. This was one of those stream-of-consciousness entries that has only had a cursory review for spelling and grammer. I am going to avoid editing this thing to death and just see where it goes. At the end, I may have arrived somewhere 180 degrees from here.

With blessings and abundance to all, good night!

Faith in business and business in faith

I have not written a while for a number of reasons, but most importantly because I just had so many thoughts and feelings that I just could not seem to organize into a rational, well organized thought. Primarily, this has been focused around how faith works in the business place and conversely how business works in the faith place.

So the only way I can come up with to resolve this is to write myself to that place of well organized thought or at least try. I see so many people struggling with this and dearly want to dig into it and see where God takes us and what he/she reveals. I hope that you will join me as we explore how this works in real time at Journey IFC.

Blessings!

Tom Kimmel

Wow, what a Sunday. I have not cried like that in a long time, especially in public. Tom Kimmel just absolutely blew me away. God is a speaking through that man of immense talent.

Of course this is after Rick absolutely knocks the cover off the ball in his Bible Study.

No deep thoughts today, just a lot of hard work on our new house. This gives me time to reflect on where I am and where I am going. Its all good!

Tomorrow is another day with meetings, clients that don't want to step-up, blah, blah, blah. The point will be to see where God is working in all this. He is and it is just hard to see sometimes in my business.

Later

Laughter - "God's lessons from a 1 year old"

I was playing with my 1 year old last night and we started laughing. We laughed and laughed and laughed for 20 minutes or more. It was absolutely contagious, even to the point that we would just look at one another and just start laughing. It was a glorious moment.

Later I would contemplate that 20 minutes as I was doing some thinking (discerning) about my journey to ordination. I thought about the purity of a 1 year olds laugh and how "in the moment" that child is. They have no expectations, no worries, no inner dialogue (ego) talking to them - just pure bliss. They are simply reacting to a stimulus in the simplest and purest way.

I thought about how at that moment, I had turned off all my adult noise - other thoughts simply melted away. I was focused for 20 minutes on just being in each moment laughing with my son. I was the most free that I think I have been in a long time. It brought to extraordinary levels my understanding of being in the moment with whomever you are with - being present to share God's gift of another.


I often am not present in the moment. God, through my son, had provided the most incredible lesson. One that I have tried to learn and practice many times, but do not do well - to be in the moment, focused, centered, present. To get that lesson from a 1 year old. A child who only knows the moment. What an incredible teacher he is! What a gift! What abundance as I am blessed beyond compare with teachers all around me.

So, who is the next teacher and what is the next lesson? Last night my teacher was my 1 year old, Ryan. Last week it was my friend Blair. Today, it might be a homeless person playing the guitar for change. Who has God blessed you with as a teacher today? Be present in each moment and you might just be suprised!

Abundance

I was reminded during the last couple of weeks that we are surrounded by abundance. It showed up in so many ways as to leave me in awe. It was the amazing conversation about foregiveness with our friend Blair. It was the off-handed question to a contractor that will save us thousands of dollars. It was the time spent with my 1 year old son who wanted to play peek-a-boo.

All of these things are abundance. It is not all about monetary abundance (read material wealth). It can be as simple as time with a loved one or as complex as the interaction of 5 people leading to just the right person showing up in your life at the moment you need them. If one opens oneself to this and does not set expectations around the outcome, it is incredible who or what will come into your life. I have seen this occur so many times that I know that it will happen in perfection.

Now, before anybody starts thinking that I have all this figured out and should be writing the next bestseller, let me tell you that I "forget" to trust this elemental truth all the time. My human (ego) need to feel like I am in control takes over. In fact the need to control rises in direct proportion to seriousness of the circumstances. I internalize the situation until I am about to burst and then when everything appears "lost", I give it back to God as my last desperate act. Until then I say God has it, but really I have a death grip on all of it.

This brings me back to abundance again. When I let go, the abundance that God already had me cloaked in is obvious. When I remove expectations, I see the abundance that is all around me. When I quiet my internal dialogue and slow down my busy life, abundance is there. When you truly open yourself up to God's abundance, abundance that is around you ALL the time, life becomes this amazing journey. You never know who or what will show up next. You just know that it will!

With blessings to all, good night and good luck!

Warehouse

Journey now has a home! Our search for a permanent location was completed today when we signed a lease for a building that is a mix of office and warehouse space.

My feelings are mixed. On one hand, we have a place where we can worship and do many kinds of mission and service work in this world. On the other hand, we have taken another step towards attachment to material things as a driver of our faith. We will inevitably create all kinds of emotional ties to the warehouse. We will call it our own and feel that it somehow makes us more faithful. In the end, it is up to us to remember that warehouse is not imbued with any special mechanism to dispense faith. It is only a tool that God has loaned us for a time to do his work.

Next, we have to make changes to the building to make it 'suitable'. We will try very hard to make this process and its results the minimum possible to serve God's plan for us. We are not here to make this into a monument to ourselves and our pocketbooks, but to make sure the building is capable of fulfilling God's plan. I love Habitat's approach to building: to provide an affordable and well-built home to a deserving family. We would do well to remember this goal in building our own home.

I am asking all of you to join me in a prayer that our community will remember its faithful roots as it moves into the warehouse. That we stay focused on God's plans for the warehouse and not our own. That we use it as his tool.

Only time will tell how faithful we will be to God's purpose.

I will continue to blog this process as it moves forward. It will be an important, valuable, and very public lesson in church and human dynamics. I look forward to others thoughts on the warehouse, its finishout, and its use during the next year or two. It should be interesting!!!!

With blessings to all, good night and good luck!

Church Structure and ordination thoughts

I should have known that everything would go smoothly. After all the worrying, emails, and last minute discussions, we handed the election of our Minitry leaders and Shepherd's over to God (where it really had always been) and it went so smoothly. It was a reminder to me of my days on the board of the local Habitat for Humanity when we would do the same thing. Discuss, plan, worry, give to it God, and everything works out in perfection.

Now we will see how our leaders learn to trust God. The next year will be a time when our community will probably grow more in its faith then anyone can possibly imagine. It will be an amazing process to see unfold. My own Journey, I suspect, will be very similar as I work toward being ordained in our Church.

The beginning of the discernment process has already shown this to be true. I really started in prayer and contemplation about taking on this process in early December. Through the loss of a young relative, my 10 month old son having surgery, my business slowing down, and all the drama of the by-laws being completed, the warehouse being approved, and the leadership being selected, I have found that the decision to seek ordination has been strong and only grew stronger.

The new year brings new opportunities in business and selection to be a Shepherd of our church community. Along with the normal family pressures, both of these will test my intent. I will have to stay strong in my commitment to prayer, discernment, study, and listening for "God's voice" in my daily life. It is wonderful challenge to have!

To close my first entry, I want to say that I truly look forward to this challenge and the opportunity to step ever deeper into God's vision for this world. I relish the opportunity to speak with and listen to all of you throughout this process. Your input, observations, questions, comments, prayers, etc. are welcome to encourage learning and growth together. I hope that this blog will provide a lens to view more closely the growth of a new church, a new christian, and a new way to view God's work in his/her world.

With blessings to all, good night and good luck!

Inch Pebbles

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