Father’s Day today. I was reminded of this today in ‘church’ (the group of world racers speaking what they believe God has for us) when Clinton had James Spano speak of his dad. James told some stories of his dad, of his dad gathering the kids at night and praying with them. James shared how much he misses his dad. Mr. Spano was killed in a car accident 4 years ago, and James was devastated.
James prayed for all our dads. I thanked God for my dad. James prayed for the fatherless. For all the people who do not have dads. All the people with strained relationships with their dads. I thought of my mom who lost her dad when she was 16 years old. I think of my dad, who lost his dad, I forget, 12 years ago now? I think of my best man, John, who lost his dad a month ago.
My brain continued to spin…to the blog I wrote on neural pruning. The young people whose dad’s are home, but the lights are not on. The orphans we are working with. Another generation without dad’s. Another generation whose brains are developing with holes that need to be plugged by a dad.
When we were living in Wilmington, MA, we were trying to figure out what it truly meant to live for God in that lifestyle. We tried to be committed to stuff in church. Trying to learn what it meant to follow Jesus, to serve, to walk by faith, to sacrifice. I can’t say I really figured it out, though.
As I post my thoughts on what it means to be discipled by Jesus, I realize people are offended and defend their lifestyle in christianity as we know it in the states. In the local church. The small church with a large budget. I say small church, in comparison to the amount of people who attend Lakewood or Willow Creek or any of these megachurches that set the pace in the US. I say large budget in comparison with these African churches under a tree, the South American churches with the mud floors.
I think of generational curses, how much I love my dad, how much I have become like my dad. How my sons (which my mom always seemed to wish) will be just like me. I think of the church family, how we pass on dysfunction without even knowing it. It is like the family secret that is better left alone, except everyone privately and sometimes ignorantly suffers from this dysfunction. This dysfunction travel with us. My dysfunctions effect and infect our small team, our large team.
I thought of the old guys, waiting to die. Fathers sitting on the shelves. Heads full of wisdom which has been filed away, only accessible through the motivation aroused by the curiosity of a younger person. An old person, feeling unneeded, not realizing how valuable they are. Maybe in humility, maybe in defeat, life experiences are lost in a nursing home, or a senior citizen’s group.
I think of the high schoolers that Linnea and I left behind to head out on this adventure. We felt that there was a need for us to experience a commitment to these kids. We felt that maybe we could offer them who we are, what we are. We did not really have Youth Ministry training, but we were young once. When I talk about this, I am often told that we have hearts for youth and hearts for missions. Honestly, I have a heart for me. I have a heart for hops, a good IPA. If it were all the same to God, I could spend the rest of my life drinking beer. I like to be alone, so no one challenges my opinions. I like to walk my dog and lay on the couch watching football. I like to sleep in, I like to lift heavy things, I like to challenge myself physically, I like a good adrenaline rush. I would not say I have a natural heart for others. I don’t naturally have a heart for the great commission. For the youth or for missions.
But, there is supposed to be something to this ‘being saved’ thing. To being “bornagin”. Being a “bornagin” does not mean I am somehow right. In some way better than others and now I have a right to judge others. Being “bornagin” means I am supposed to have a heart more like Jesus’s. A heart for this family I am ‘bornagin’ into. So if I have a heart for youth and missions, I believe that is because Jesus is drawing my heart more towards his.
Because I believe Jesus’s heart is for the young, for discipleship, for the nations, I have tried to change who I am. A thought from Richard Rohr is: we don’t change our lives by changing our thinking, but we change our thinking by changing our lives.
Our lives were changed by committing for two years to the youth. Two highlights for us were going on a mission trip with them to New York and a mission trip with them to New Orleans. I believe these experiences did more to effect our lives (the kids and Linnea and I) and more to change our thinking than any big budget youth program could achieve.
Now we are travelling around the world. I believe that for our kids back home, this decision will do more to teach God’s power and dreams than any book study or discussion on finding the will of God could do. A major motivation for us to come out and do this with our lives was to demonstrate for these kids that this is possible.
We hope that more people will take the time to teach these lessons to young people, people who are still impressionable, before the dying off of millions of cells occurs (neural pruning- the loss of unused brain cells). That more people will make the sacrifice of time and energy, even money, to instill in the young the capacity to dream.
