Sun 16 Mar 2008
Oh my gosh. It’s been entirely too long before I’ve written here! Just when you think you have a grip on things man do those things change quick!!!
I’ve been in a complete whirlwind for these past 3 months or so. Last time I wrote an update we were expecting our second child. We ended up having Luke on November 27th. It was an amazing event because my wife actually had him at “home” (in our apartment…yes, on purpose). That was incredible and a culmination of a lot of things God was teaching us that year. However, a week prior to that event we got 2 big pieces of news that pretty much shook us up!
The first news was the Joeleen’s mother’s ovarian cancer returned (after 7 years of being clean) and this time it was accompanied with lung cancer as well. The other piece of news was the people that were renting our house (with the intent of buying it) decided they didn’t want to buy the house after all and told us they were leaving by December. So we had a newborn to deal with, moving and Joeleen’s mother’s news. December was completely crazy for us.
January wasn’t much different. Bottom line, we’re back in Bixby, in our old home, right back at square one!!! Hahaha….This has been one of the only things I’ve had to do that I REALLY didn’t want to do at all. The last thing I wanted was to end up back in Tulsa. It feels like I’ve stepped backwards. But, I’ve slowly given it over my pride to God since it’s quite obvious He wants us back here.
Since I’ve been back God has really been teaching me about community and what the “church” is really supposed to be about and look like. I have so much to talk about, but I don’t know how to articulate it! It’s very confusing to me. I hope I’ll start writing again and possibly it will come out in some new articles.
I haven’t been doing much street ministry. I’ve been focusing a lot on this community thing and really let God develop that in me.
There’s a bunch more to write, but hopefully this will suffice at least for a bit. I really want to write more, so maybe this will be a nice primer for me!
March 19th, 2008 at 11:35 am
It’s so good to hear from you again Paul. I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to post on this site again
Sorry to hear about all the sad news. As always I pray that God will be able to bring good out of this situation.
I look forward to hearing your attempts at articulating what you are learning about community. I am a firm believer that mission and community go hand in hand. For an excellent summary of this see:
http://www.thecrowdedhouse.org/?q=ourvalues
I look forward to hearing your further reflections… don’t wait too long
March 19th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out!
Thanks for popping by and not forgetting about me!!
I hope you’re doing well.
Paul
March 25th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Paul,
I really appreciate this site. It explains a lot of the same things I have been believing for years. Most of my beliefs about being a follower of Jesus stem from my time on the mission field in Europe. The evangelistic team I worked with travelled from town to town, from Sweden to Romania. We preached and witnessed on the streets during the day and at night held tent meetings where we preached, prayed for the sick and cast out deamons. We lived in old city busses the girls in one the guys in another and families had their own. One bus was the kitchen bus, it was where we met every morning to sing praises encourage one another and pray for each other. It was true community, a real body with one mind to reach the lost and help each other. One gets in such a spiritual groove when they live like that, churchy people can’t understand it. I met a great girl from Wisconsin there and we came back to the US and got married. Now, together with our 3 children we strive to live as simply as possible to allow as much time as possible to serve Jesus. We have refrained from buying a real house and live in a displosable one, a trailer. We love it it’s cozy and we don’t have the preasure of a $700/mo payment. Some of our family won’t visit us here but that’s not all bad.
By the way, one of my best friends I served with in Europe is Roland who posted a message on the “What’s wrong with this picture?” page.
Shine!
Brian
March 26th, 2008 at 1:29 am
Brian,
Awesome little snippet of your story. Sounds great!!! I’m glad you stopped by the site and enjoy some of the articles…feel free to comment or whatever as you go along!
I don’t know if you saw it or not, but for a while there (before we found out we were pregnant) we were living out of a 30′ travel trailer…haha…everybody thought we were insane but we really had a blast. I always said, “You can only be in 1 room no matter how big your house is, might as well make your house 1 room!!” It was a bummer to come back to the house and get stuck with this payment. I just wish we didn’t have to go through the process of trying to sell it again!!!! That was no fun at all.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by.
Paul