#140 Growing

Lately I've been asking church members how they'd like to grow as Christians, if there are any areas where they'd like to improve their spiritual life. As Christians, we always want to be maturing, becoming more and more like Jesus. As pastor, I have the privilege and challenge of encouraging others to grow in their walk with Christ. Hearing what other people have to say about growing in their faith is also really interesting to me.

As I hear from others, I naturally think about myself and my own life. There are quite a few areas where I wish I was better at following Christ, but one that's been on my mind a lot recently is prayer. I'm pretty comfortable praying, both privately and in public. I've made some progress in truly expressing my feelings to God. But I wish I prayed more often and more spontaneously. I wish prayer characterized my whole life instead of feeling like something I remember to do every once in a while. I think part of my struggle is an underlying desire to be self-sufficient. I don't want to pray about some things because I think I should handle them myself. Deep down I know that's silly. God's actions and our actions aren't mutually exclusive, and I really can't do anything without God empowerment.  Yet I still neglect to pray about lots of things.

But as bad as my foolish attempts at independence can be, an even bigger obstacle to my prayer life is my amazing ability to distract myself. Life is filled with little gaps: a couple minutes between arriving at an appointment and the event starting, a few moments spent waiting for someone else to arrive or get ready, that sort of thing. Once in a great while I think that a short space is a great opportunity for prayer. But much more often than I not I pull out my smartphone and read some worthless article that I'm only semi-interested in or I fret about all things I'd like to accomplish yet today or I spend some time rehashing an earlier conversation that didn't go nearly as well as I would've liked. It would be so much better if I could take even some of that time and pray for God's strength as I deal with upcoming challenges or ask for God to make His presence clear in the lives of the people I just spent time with or to thank God for answering some earlier prayers. But I don't work that way, at least not yet. Prayer takes work and commitment, and distractions are so much easier and too often even more appealing to me. It's clear that I could use some growth.

Grace and peace,
BMH

#139 Whose Church?

As the pastor of Kanawha Christian Reformed Church, I live in the parsonage, which is across the street from the church building. Lanie, my two-year-old daughter, has gotten used to going across the street for worship on Sunday mornings. She also sometimes comes with my wife to visit me when I'm working in the study during the week. When Lanie looks out our window at the church building or talks about somebody going there, she refers to it as "Daddy's church." I'm glad that she's making a connection between me and the church. I work for the church and represent it in many ways. But I keep trying to explain to her that it's not just my church; it's her church, too. And it's Mommy's church and Miss Tracy's church and Miss Marilyn's church and Mister Larry's church and so on and so forth. We're all members of this church. I'm the pastor, but that doesn't give me any special claim of ownership. We all make up the congregation; it's our church. However, while I keep gently correcting Lanie, I know she's not the only one who thinks that way. I've heard some church members who've been around here much longer than I have refer to it as "Brian's church." I get it. It's easy to associate me with the church, and that's a nice way to talk about it to people who know me.

But as pastor, I think it's very important for me not to think of the church as my church. I do have quite a bit of authority, but I can't just do whatever I want. (On the flip-side, I have many responsibilities, but there are also a lot of roles that church members need to fill.) The church is a community; we're all in this together. It's our church. Plus, we believe that there truly is a head, a leader, an owner of the church. But that's not me; it's Christ Jesus. Jesus is in charge of the church. Jesus is the one who has saved us and brought us together. I serve the church because I serve Jesus, and the church belongs to Him. Remembering that keeps me humble, and it gives me hope when times are tough. So I'll keep telling Lanie that it's her church, and I'll work on helping understand that it's also really Jesus' church.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#138 B-Dubs

I'm late on the blog this week. Sorry about that. Because I'm late, I'll try to keep this short. Last night Tess and I and Lanie went out for Tess's birthday. We went to Buffalo Wild Wings (from here on, B-Dubs). That may seem like an odd choice to you, dear reader, but that's really not out of the ordinary for Tess and me. If I had to guess, I would say we've eaten at B-Dubs more than any other restaurant in our married life. Part of that is because we enjoy it. Wings or chicken tenders with a whole variety of sauces just hits the spot for us sometimes. But after six years of marriage, there's something almost sentimental about B-Dubs for us. You see, about a month after our wedding we moved to Grand Rapids, MI. There was a B-Dubs basically across the street from where we lived. The night we moved in, we went there after a long day of traveling and unloading. From then on whenever we didn't want to cook, there was B-Dubs. Whenever we planned on going out but didn't really know what we wanted to eat, there was B-Dubs. When we were dead tired and celebrating our first anniversary a few days late, there was B-Dubs. When we were in Washington for the summer and our hiking plans for our second anniversary were ruined by rain and we drove into the nearest city, there was B-Dubs. Nowdays when we have to go to Walmart and decide that we want to go out to eat since we're driving at least an hour and a half round trip, what's basically the first restaurant we see? You got it, B-Dubs. At this point it's tradition. It's our place. Maybe that's unusual, but that's okay. It's us.

Grace and peace,
BMH