Week 3 of the Kindgom Experiment

I sat in a room last night with people who were sharing openly about some of the hardest times in their lives. Times when they mourned. Their stories were honest and personal and raw....and all in the past tense. Mourning. Something they did. Something that they worked through. A time in the past when they were comforted. Their words and their faces and their tears were beautiful.

Those that shared last night lost something or someone that was important to them. It happened one day, one time, either expected or out of the blue. But it was still that one time. The day their parent died. The day they had to say goodbye. The end of a marriage. The day they got divorced. A single event. Something that can be marked on a calendar and grieved and remembered and honored. That one day.

...but blessed are those who still mourn? Who still, day after day after day live in the same place they were originally broken. I don't know.

One of our experiments from FCU this week is this:

Going. Going. Gone

Worship pastor Mike Crawford sings these words:

"Blessed when plans
that you so carefully laid
end up in the junkyard with
all the trash you made"

Consider yourself and those you know who mourn the loss of a future that will never be realized. Spend a week considering how God redeems the dreams and futures of those he loves.

And so I will.

Kiva

Mukono, Uganda is a place that I will never probably visit. To be honest, it was a place that I didn't even know existed until early last week, and yet it is a place that I can't get off of my mind. Apolot Grace is her name and she has four kids and a husband who works a job as a civil servant. She works as a tailor, a farmer and runs a General Store. She lives in a country that has an average life expectancy of 45 years, a literacy rate of 60% and an average annual income of $1,700. By my standards, she would be poor in spirit. Not by hers. The first line of her profile reads.."Apolot Grace is a hard working lady with lots of vision.."
Vision.... I immediately fell in love with her in one sentence.

One of the challenges from week one of FCU was to pick an experiement, a sort of experiential learning opportunity, to put into practice the things that we have been talking about. One of the options was to participate in this incredibly cool micro-lending program that provides loans to people in underdeveloped places all over the globe through kiva.com.

In this upside down, backwards, counter intuitive Kingdom, the notion that Apolot Grace's and my paths would intertwine is nothing but ordinary. Nothing special, nothing to blog about or go on about. Just normal. That might be the coolest thing about it.

First Church University

One of the many really awesome things that has happened at our church over the last year of so is the introduction of First Church University, or FCU. It is this powerful, intimate, reciprocative time of not just studying the scripture, but dissecting and discussing and deliberating in order to make sense of it in a way that changes not just our thinking, but our lives. It has come to be the highlight of my week and we just began a new study of the Beatitudes called The Kingdom Experiment.

I have to admit that I kind of felt like I might be burnt out on the Beatitudes. I have been listening to Rob Bell and friends at Mars Hill while I am at the gym and they have been doing a lengthy study of the Sermon on the Mount. When Pastor Troy announced that the new FCU study was going to cover the Beatitudes, I might have ......yawned. However, I am finding out more and more that God knows how I think and more importantly how I don't, and this feeling like my iPod is stuck on replay with the Sermon on the Mount is no sort of accident.

We began our first FCU session last week and were challenged to really discover what Jesus meant when he referred to those that were poor in spirit. As happens every week, there are people that offer ideas that cause me to think in ways that I haven't before. One thing that last weeks discussion really reiterated for me was more of what the poor in spirit are not. It's not someone who has tried and failed and is open to God moving through their lives. It is not someone who is humble enough to raise up their hands and give their situation to God. It's not the sad or the scarred or those that feel life's uncertainty. I believe that Jesus was talking about those who struggle to merely exist in a consuming sense of depravity. Those who would lift their hands up and give in if they had the strength, but for them just the act of taking a breath is almost more than they can do. It's a state that is beyond broken, but decimated.

If this is true, if these are the people to which Jesus announces the inheritance of the Kingdom of God, then it changes everything. It flips upside down this idea I have of what living is all about. If the Kingdom of God is so extravagantly different than the world I exist in, I have no choice but to change the way that I live. It's like I have been given this incredible secret, I was given the first and last chapters of the story, to write the middle with no regard to the final scene would be insane.

And so that is where I am. In that place that is all too familiar, where thoughts, feelings, the need to do something, the need to do anything differently.... all collide. One of the really cool parts of the Kingdom Experiment study is to chose an experiment, or challenge, to live out each week. I have finished my challenge for the first week and will be posting a blog about it later. I am excited and overwhelmed and just a little bit scared about what the next several weeks will bring. But I'm open.