worship

The Great Outdoors (Prayer devotional for the week of June 29, 2014)

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What comes to mind when you think of summer? Even as blazing hot as it is, I still think of the great outdoors—especially anything having to do with water. I spent my summers on swim team and love the water! Playing in sprinklers and drinking straight from the hose, swimming in the lake and pool, collecting shells and rocks at the beach, going canoeing at church camp, having water balloon and squirt gun wars … there are so many fun things to do outside.

There is something about being in and around water that is so soothing, so inviting, so relaxing. Watching waves on the beach or listening to nature sounds at the lake seems to slow down time and re-center our perspectives.

And yet, water can also be unsettling … to the Gulf Coast resident bracing for another hurricane … to the adult at the pool party who never learned to swim … to the tent cities in Haiti during the rainy season.

I’ve often heard that even the poorest in America are far richer than the poor in many other places of the world. It is hard to fathom, but let’s try to think about it. I wouldn’t particularly want to bathe in Lake Waco or the Bosque or Brazos Rivers, but any of those options would be better than a sewage-laden, stagnant gutter. If worse came to worst, I could walk into just about any public building around town and take a non-toxic, free drink from the nearest water fountain. When I turn on the faucets in my house, I expect clear water to come pouring out. We may be under drought conditions, but we still have washing machines, dishwashers, sprinklers, bottled water and swimming pools accessible to us. None of us will die of thirst tomorrow.

Yet, some others will.

So, as you head to the lake/pool/river to celebrate during this holiday weekend, let’s turn our hearts to God in thanksgiving for the blessings of our freedom, to be certain, but also his creation. Take time to thank him for “little” things – like indoor plumbing and the fact that we can worship freely in church today – and lift up those who cannot.
Originally posted July 3, 2011

Brazil 2013: construction report

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My pastor asked me to give the construction report for our Brazil trip at church this morning, so I thought I would share my notes here. We’ll have a video slideshow of pictures to accompany the report. My two-fold hope is that people will realize that they, too, are capable of participating in a project like this, and also that folks will understand that the construction was about more than just a building.

—

I was asked to give the construction report, and as I thought about what to share, I realized how dull it might sound to most of you to hear about the half-dozen pallets of bricks that we moved from Point A to Point B to Point C and back to Point A during the first couple of days. The pictures of sweaty folks spreading masa, painting with respiratory masks, climbing scaffolding and using power tools aren’t as flattering as the VBS team’s colorful and playful snapshots, I’m certain. I suppose we could have a show-and-tell about our scrapes, bruises, sunburns and Bob’s broken foot :), but what it boils down to is that building a chapel in roughly six days was a lot of hard work. But, it was also one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life.

In Matthew 6, Jesus demonstrated to his disciples how to pray. (It’s what we know today as the Lord’s Prayer.) One line of that prayer has always given me pause, and last week in Brazil, it finally dawned on me what it might mean. The line is “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

What does it really mean to usher in the kingdom of God here on earth? Philippians 2:10-11 gives us a glimpse when it says “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

As we were building the chapel in Guanabara, I realized that we were adding to the kingdom of heaven, heavy brick by crumbly brick. On the first full day at the site when Val showed me ever-so-patiently how to spread masa on cement blocks, I thought about people like him and his precious wife Luciana, who came to know Christ as a result of previous mission trips, and my heart rejoiced.

“… at the name of Jesus every knee should bow …”

On the day we finished the walls and began the roof, I listened to Fidelis (one of the pedredos) singing praise songs in Portuguese while he worked, and I thought about one of the last memories I have of my brother, standing next to him in church singing, and he looked over at me and smiled with that smirky grin of his, and my heart longed to hear his voice again.

“…every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord …”

When I walked across the street to use the restroom at the neighborhood bar – a place where many in the community perhaps sought escape from the stresses of life, I wondered about people who would happen by the church and stop in, out of curiosity, and my heart ached for them to find real refuge in our Savior.

“… to the glory of God the Father …”

This, friends, is the kingdom of God on earth. For now, we worship at a distance from the new church in Guanabara, but one day, we will stand together in worship of our God and Savior.