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!
Welcome to Inch Pebbles
Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?"
Expediencey asks the question, "Is it politic?"
But conscience asks the question, "Is it right?"
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular because conscience tells on it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.
We think of our Journey in life as one of great milestones, but it is the small steps, inch pebbles, that are the stuff of real life.
Expediencey asks the question, "Is it politic?"
But conscience asks the question, "Is it right?"
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular because conscience tells on it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.
We think of our Journey in life as one of great milestones, but it is the small steps, inch pebbles, that are the stuff of real life.
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1 comment:
I cannot WAIT to see what happens with this whole warehouse experience. I spent some time in it this week and it's just ... a huge adjustment after a year and a half of being "placeless." There's a part of me that thinks that being placeless is best - like the children of Israel wandering in the desert. I don't think of the warehouse as the "Promised Land," however ... any Promised Land is dangerous. Moses warns the people as they're about to enter the Promised Land that when they've gotten all settled, they're likely to forget the One who brought them out of where they used to be and to this new place. That's what I'm passionate about right now - not the color of the paint, not the configuration of the computers, not the way we decorate the big room for worship. The only thing that matters is that we continue to remember Why we've been given the ridiculously amazingly beautiful honor of serving God through Journey. And that's all I have to say about that.
Doug, you have been at the heart of this entire warehouse process. I pray for you every day. May our Promised Place be in our hearts and in the heart of God rather than in a warehouse or a YMCA or anywhere else.
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