You know that book, Your Best Life Now?  Will we are starting the The Best Year, right now.  The next 14 months are going to be ridiculous.  I have spent all week, meeting, praying, and then writing out the vision for next year and I have to tell you everyone is saying that this is going to be our best year ever!

We have fine tuned the stuff that is working, cut some of the our “busy” activities and added some of the things you requested, i.e. a family retreat.

Please join me in prayer as we start implementing His plan for our Community.

Can you believe it is that end of October!  This week we will meet as a leadership team to plan out what we hear God saying to us for this coming year.  It is always a time of huge excitement and careful reflection.  Weighing through this past years decisions, deciding which roads and opportunities we nailed and which ones need reevaluated in the light of a new calendar.

I would love to hear from you all as to what things were really meaningful for you and what things were either a struggle or were just missing in your experience in ’09.

Just some of the things we will be looking to bring back: Turkey bowl (possibly later in the year); Opening Day; Movie Night; Swedish Day Parade; Big Baptism Sunday; Sex Week (Can you ever really get enough?); Family/couples month; New Years Eve Bash; Back to School Outreach; FREE Car Clinic and something for the 4th of July.

We want some new ideas for teaching series, small groups, High Water Mark and retreats.

We are planning on Tuesday and Wednesday this week so shoot me your ideas as soon as possible.

I wanted to say thanks to everyone for their concern and kindness through this process.  Sometimes I feel more like a scared kid than a Godly man.  That is when more than ever I lean on God’s nature to reveal his strength in our weaknesses.

Johnny had his first day of chemo yesterday, and it went really well.  He struggled a little to sleep last night but hasn’t been sick.  Keep praying for him.  I know you are, it just makes me feel better to keep telling you that.

God,

Wow!  You really are amazing.  I can’t imagine what my life would be like without you.  I am so thankful I will never have to find out.

Wishing I had more time to hang out with you today,

Jerry

God is faithful!  At times I say that out of rote.  It isn’t that I don’t believe it, it’s just that I have said it so many times that I am capable of saying it the way you might say, “good day.”  Some times I say it as a testimony or affirmation, like when someone tells me a great story demonstrating God’s faithfulness.  Sometimes I say it as an encouragement, when friends or families in our church are going through hard times and I am not sure what else to say.

But today it is something different.  I am not altogether sure what it is.  Maybe it is me trying to encourage myself, maybe it is an affirmation that He has been faithful and so it stands to reason that He would go on being just so, but I think if I am honest there is a bit of a question is there as well.  A question filled with hope, hope and desire that it is true, but a question all the same.

One of my closest friends in the world is struggling with cancer.  He is going to be ok!!!  He is going to be healed!!! And yet setting with him at a friends house, or at his house or in another doctors apt. watching him endure soo much, sets my mind to wondering.  God is faithful.

I have just returned from a pastor’s conference in Atlanta Georgia.  It was amazing.  To see and here what God is doing in and through so many people in so many different places in so many different ways.  To see him touch my ministry partner and have him so affected.  To watch the affect of God and his church on the social injustices of the world and have a sense that we are doing it, we, the church, are getting it done, right in so many ways, in so many places for so many people.  God is faithful.  I have seen it, I see it, and I can see it well into the future into the lives of my children and theirs after them.

But then to come home and see my friend, struggle in and out of service, to watch as they put a medicine port in him for the long road that lays ahead of us.  And we will walk that road together and we will come out on the other side together, one way or another.  But it raises the question of what God’s faithfulness really looks like.

God is faithful!  So how do I reconcile what my friend is going through.  Maybe this is just an opportunity for me, and for my friend to learn something more about His faithfulness.  He is faithful when all is well, and there is no sickness in our bodies.  So what does His faithfulness look like when all is NOT well.  When sickness is ravaging those closest to us.  When Mother’s lose their children, when children lose their mothers; when little girls are raped, when men become animals.

As a man and as a pastor I feel compelled to offer answers to these questions.  And I could theorize about freewill, the nature of sin, the natural laws of a fallen creation and on and on and on.  But I would still be a guy, with a sick friend, reflecting on this simply true, simply hopeful and honestly confusing idea: God is faithful!

God,

I love you very much.  I am so thankful for every moment of this life.  I thank you for Johnny, and I ask that you be faithful in him.  Allow us to grow and learn through this experience, and allow that your kingdom would grow as well.  But be swift, in touching him.  Please don’t allow this to go one minute longer than it needs to.  And Father, if there is any of this that I can take away from him please let me.

Your Son and biggest fan,

Jerry