Grace At The Altar

Earlier this morning I had the incredible privilege of officiating the wedding of my friends Mike Jobe & Kristen Sharpe.  That’s right, a Friday morning, 11 AM wedding.  Hey, there’s a first time for everything.

I first met Mike & Kristen over a year ago when they started attending the Summit, but really got to know them this past spring when they were finishing up the Starting Point process.  Their story is an amazing one, and I share it here with their permission, because you need to hear it.

When M & K first started attending the Summit, they were living together.  As they sat through worship services, checked out Starting Point, and got involved in friendships, Jesus became real to them and they realized that the lifestyle that they were living wasn’t compatible with God’s desire for their lives.  Because of a couple of key people they met at Starting Point and the conversations that ensued, Mike & Kristen made the very painful decision to move out and put their physical relationship on hold until the wedding.

That decision caused a ripple effect throughout their friends and family circles.  In short, it made no sense.  Here you have a couple who are obviously compatible, who are getting married anyway, and who are just months away from a ceremony.  

Financially, it was irresponsible.  

Relationally, it was dangerous.  

Socially, it was suicide.  

People questioned them, people made fun of them, and people were trying to figure out why in the world they drank the Kool Aid and hitched their wagon to the cult known as Christianity.

But Mike & Kristen plodded on.  Did they make mistakes?  Sure.  Did they stumble along the way?  They’d be honest enough to tell you “yes.”  But throughout the last three months, they were more concerned about reflecting the glory of their God than fulfilling their own desires or doing what made sense to the world around them.

This is a statement that Mike & Kristen wrote and asked me to read in their ceremony:

“Over the past few months we have grown in ways we have never imagined possible.  By the grace of God and the love of Christ we have come to find peace and happiness in our daily lives.  We went through struggles and even failures at times, but have gained an incredible amount of patience through the ups and downs.  Our main focus has remained on Christ no matter how rocky the road may have been.  If we could show any one of you what Christ has done and continues to do for us, it would be in this one simple and meaningful scripture: ‘A cord of three strands is not easily broken.’ (Ecclesiastes 4:12).  Our lives together now will lean solely on that truth.  I guess you could say that the greatest thing we found out through this whole process was how much more we love God than we love each other.”

Summit peeps, that’s the culture we want to build here.  Mike & Kristen found grace in Jesus, and grace through his people.  They weren’t judged or shamed, just exposed to the life-changing truth of the scripture.  In March, the light came on.  In April, they were baptized and joined the Summit.  And today, they became husband and wife.  Take a minute (right now!) and pray that God will bless their new marriage and help them build that cord of three strands!

 

Must…Fight…Slippery…Slope…

365 days.

That’s exactly how long it took from resolution #5 in this post to the announcement I bring you today:

I’m now on Twitter.

Before you protest too loudly, the truth is that I feel like a sellout.  No, it’s not a “professional” account (that’s what the @BrierCreekAM feed is for).  It’s simply a way to make random observations about life as I’m on the go.  Life in 140, if you will.

So here’s the deal: if you’d like to follow the Twitter feed, you have two options…

1. Check here often and take a gander at the box on the right.  There it is, over there —>
2. Sign up for your very own Twitter account, which involves the following steps:

• Click the “Who Tweeted?” text over there —> (go on, click it!)
• When the Twitter page pops up, click “Join today.”
• Follow the prompts.
• Promise never, ever, ever to tell me that you’re shopping at Target.  Or the mall.  Or eating cheese.
• Or I will despise you.

My Twitter posts will likely be few and far between (but then again, you know how I am at promises like that.  Sheesh.  I’ll use them to update you on the randomness that’s called Danny in Real Life…that stuff that I can’t necessarily wait to blog about.  So come on, join me.  It’ll be fun.

Next stop: MySpace.

(just kidding)

 

Happy Blogday

Drum roll, please…

(No seriously, go ahead and rock one out on your desk.  I’ll wait.)

Today is the one year anniversary of the Connective Tissue blog.  Or birthday.  Or day of observance.  Come on, how am I supposed to know what to call it?  I stumbled on this fact quite by accident a couple of days ago, and I tell you that because I don’t want you to think that I’ve been obsessively crossing off the days on a cutesy “What to Expect the First Year on Your Blog” calendar that I keep hidden in my desk. (sample excerpt: “Three months old: The blog was so cute today!  He got his first negative comment, but responded with an equally snarky comeback.  I’m so proud of him.”)

I don’t know what to do with this one-year mark.  Do I throw confetti?  Bake the blog a cake?  Bake everybody else a cake but get the blog its own little cupcake so it can smear it all over its cyberself?  Take it to Olan Mills for 12 month photos?  I’m telling you people, I got nothin’.

It’s hard to believe that it was a year ago that this post was tossed out there for all the world to see, followed closely by death threats from friends of the Star Wars blogger.  (You’ll have to read post #2 to find out more about that.)

This is the point where I should probably say something about the fact that the success in this first year is due to you, the reader.  And while I know who some of you are, there are blogstalkers in our midst.  I couldn’t pick you out of a police lineup, but you know your identity.  You know the nights that you’ve read posts, thought about commenting, but just couldn’t reveal your true identity…much like when Peter Parker wants to tell Mary Jane that he’s really Spiderman but at the last minute is convinced that he’ll be the victim of identity theft if he fills out a WordPress profile.  Let’s make a resolution in year #2 to go public.  Won’t that be cool?

But truly, it’s been a fun year.  We’re at 218 posts, 538 comments, and a whole bunch of hits.  Thanks for making it a great first year, my peeps.  I’ll let you know when the cake is ready.

Oh yeah, and in honor of year #1, I re-vamped the “Who’s He?” page.  (If by “re-vamped” you mean added a photo and the words, “Campus Pastor.”  Yeah, it’s an extreme makeover.)  But really – go check it out, because it took about an hour of posing to get that laugh to look that natural.  No word on whether they can Photoshop my right eye open a little further.

 

He Had Me At “Pig Ears”

A few weeks back I asked you to submit your worst job stories: those experiences which you survived, but now make you uncomfortable to watch The Office because it hits a little too close to home.

The purpose of the stories was to help me build material for the Sermon That Never Was on June 28, so I’m sorry that I didn’t get to drop the winning story on the Brier Creek AM audience like an atomic bomb of horrible job awesomeness.  

However, one winner shone through, hands down.  Blake James’ winning entry is posted in its entirety below, and you can read the rest of the entries (all hilarious, by the way) here and here.  Blake will be receiving a copy of Dan Miller’s No More Mondays just as soon as it arrives on special order from Family Christian Stores (Apparently it’s not the runaway best seller I thought it was.  Special order?  Sheesh.  The good news is that FCS had plenty of copies of Daughtry’s CD on hand).  But hey – it’s still a great book, and Blake – I hope it’ll give you food for thought as you’re scraping up ripe Pampers off the Wal Mart parking lot.

I have two horrible job stories. One is my current job. The first was back in high school. I worked for a dog food company. We cooked pig ears for dogs to chew on. Before the were cooked you had to wash them in formaldehyde which burnt your eyes. It was the worst smelling job ever!!!!! Not mention the fine group of people I was working with. The second is I pick up trash and sweep parking lots now. When the truck wont pick up a dirty diaper left in a parking yours truly gets to do it. This job is not as bad the first one but it is still nasty. So, my request is for moms and dads not to throw dirty diapers in the middles of a parking lot. I mean really also if you smoke the butt in the Jesus hates it when you smoke ash tray.

 

Home Run!

I don’t know why I chose that post title, other than the fact that it’s getting close to the end of the productivity day and I’ve put up nary a thing on the old blog, because this post has nothing to do with baseball.  Or running to the place where your kitchen and bedroom are.  

However, you need to meet Whitney Ledford and Joe Pittman.  They are a couple of our Institute students that were assigned to the Brier Creek AM Campus this summer.  I told them at our first meeting that they needed to spend the summer being very entrepreneurial and self-supervising, because I was going to be tied up getting into fist fights with Greek airline agents, and I couldn’t be bothered.

Long story short, Joe & Whitney took on the task of developing a Hope for the Office project for the neighborhood office park here at Brier Creek.  We had two conversations about this: one prior to Greece when I gave them a general idea of what I was looking for, and one after Greece when they told me what we’d be doing, how we’d be doing it, how the logistics would work out, the names, addresses, contact persons, and shoe sizes of every stinkin’ business in Presidential Park, and exactly how many Chicken Minis each person would eat.  The event happened this morning, and you can read more about it here.

They were, in short, amazing.  They envisioned, planned, and executed the project from beginning to end.  They owned it, and they told me when to show up and what to do when I got here.  And I loved it.

Those of you who have spent some time here know my history of being a micro-manager, but people like Whitney & Joe are getting me dangerously close to giving up control.  They had every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed this morning, and the entire event went off without a hitch.

(And no, I don’t know what “without a hitch” means.  We didn’t need a hitch.  There was nothing to tow.  I just mean it was flawless.)

I’m looking forward to the few weeks I have remaining with these two.  I think I’ll give them a more challenging project, like waxing Langston’s head.*  That should be fun.

Joe & Whitney are only two examples of one of the most incredible batch of Instituters we’ve ever had.  If you haven’t gotten to know these men and women yet, better do so quickly.  They’re easy to spot: they travel in packs and always wear backpacks.  They look like Mormons without bikes.  

 

*Rick, that’s what you get for interrupting my train of thought while I’m writing.

 

Greece Dispatch, Part 3

Whoever came up with the idiotic phrase, “The longest journey begins with a single step” obviously never tried to leave Greece.

Many of you know that I was scheduled to preach at the Brier Creek AM Campus on Sunday.  You also know that due to an unforeseen air itinerary from you-know-where, I didn’t make it.  (My one regret is that I’ll never regain that twelve minutes I spent prepping that sermon.)

Here’s the rundown…believe it or not, the toned-down, edited version:

• Saturday, 3:00 AM Greece time: the alarm goes off.  I’m pretty sure I said a very bad word in my heart.
• 4:45 AM: endure a 90 minute ride to the airport on the front seat of a bus with an IMAX-sized windshield, which thankfully drew attention away from our driver who was falling asleep and trying to careen off of bridges.
• 6:30 AM: first sign something is wrong…as the rest of the team is checking in at the airport, my dear sweet mother-in-law (Ginger) who was on the trip with us, is told that she’s been bumped from the London-Boston flight due to a computer glitch on the very first leg of the trip.
• 6:45 AM: I come very close to punching the Greek ticketing agent in the throat when he tells me, “She is a grown woman who can speak for herself.  Why don’t you let her do so?”  (I think I could’ve taken him, even on three hours sleep.)
• 8:00 – 11:00 AM: Spend the entire Athens-London flight strategizing with the whole team on how we’re going to get Ginger’s luggage off the belts, get her on another flight, get through security, and pee all in the 1:15 layover we have in a major international airport.
• 11:01 AM: sprint to the front of the plane as soon as the “fasten seat belts” sign goes off, only to realize that my passport is at the back of the plane.  Not good.
• 11:15 AM: send Merriem and the rest of the team through security, promise I’ll see them in just a few minutes.
• 11:16 AM: realize that Merriem has my clothes, laptop, books, sermon notes, and Bible.
• 11:17 AM: realize that I’ll never see my team, Merriem, my clothes, or my sermon again.
• 11:40 AM: convince the British Airways ticketing agent to let me stay off the Boston-London flight by telling him that my mother-in-law doesn’t speak British.
• 12:00 PM: receive standby status for a 4:30 flight.
• 12:45 PM: find donuts.  Jesus still loves me.
• 12:55 – 3:30 PM: talk to approximately 612 different British Airways agents, walk the length of Heathrow Terminal approximately 87 times.  Pick up London tabloids to see quotes from Michael Jackson’s third grade teacher’s nephew.  Stand in line four different times to find out about flights out of Boston.  Call the U.S. six different times using a credit card.  Contemplate how many flights I could have booked for what I probably just paid to call the U.S. on a credit card.  Say another bad word in my heart for not getting the international data plan on the iPhone.  Find a secret passageway to a standby room in Heathrow where I can find out if I’m on the flight.  Realize that the person who pointed me to the secret passageway thought Ginger and I were British Airways employees.  Wonder when British Airways implemented the Redneck Exchange Program.  Ate most of Ginger’s snacks.  Talked to an older British lady named Bea.  Secretly wondered if Bea would let us come live with her since it was obvious we’d never escape London. 
• 4:00 PM: get tossed off the 4:30 flight.
• 4:15 PM: are told that there’s a possibility we’ll be on the 7:30 flight.
• 7:25 PM: are told that we’re definitely on the flight but have to run like the wind to catch it.
• 7:29 PM: are told that our paperwork isn’t right and we can’t get on the flight.
• 7:29:10 PM: gate agent sees the maniacal, nothing-to-lose gleam in my eye and lets us on the flight.
• 7:32 PM: realize that I have no idea where my luggage is.
• 11:00 PM (Boston time): land, go through customs, make several panicked phone calls to tell Summit staffers that I won’t be preaching, find out that my wife has already taken care of things.  Thank God for a great woman.
• 11:15 PM: realize that I’ll be spending the night in Boston with my mother-in-law.  Ponder that if it were any other day, this would be very odd.
• 12:30 PM: arrive at our hotel.  Two king rooms, smoking.  Doesn’t matter at this point because I’m seriously considering taking it up.
• 1:00 AM: walk down dark Boston street to a CVS pharmacy, where I buy a three dollar shirt, toothpaste, deodorant, and an A & W Root Beer.
• 1:15 AM: realize I never told anyone that I was going to CVS, so if I’m killed no one will know where to start looking.
• 1:30 – 2:30 AM: on the phone trying to get a flight out the next morning.
• 3:00 AM: sleep.
• The next morning: misjudge the time it will take for the hotel shuttle to get us back to the airport, check in at two different airlines, and get Ginger delivered to her gate, so running like crazy at the end, just to find out my flight is delayed.  Fitting.  Make it back to RDU and to the Brier Creek Campus just in time to see my 13 year old board a bus for camp.
• The next afternoon: eat Cook Out and slip into a coma.

Here’s a picture of me and Ginger rewarding ourselves for our tenacity.  (Yes, that’s a Krispy Kreme in the background.  At London Heathrow Airport.  God save the Queen’s waistline.)

Here’s a picture of Ginger getting on the flight out of Boston.  I’m not sure what happened to her after that, but my job was to get her to Boston.  This is my proof for the deposition:

 

Greece Dispatch, Part 2

I feel compelled to begin this post with the following facts related to my most recent missionary journeys:

• June 2007: I spent ten days in Central Asia in a hotel with no working air conditioning.  Our room temperature (at night) hovered around the 90º mark.
• January 2008: seven days in Hong Kong, sleeping in a double room at the YMCA with Rick Langston.  The room was so small that when he sneezed, I wiped my nose.
• June 2008: ten days in Johannesburg, South Africa during their winter.  My room temp never got above 50°, and the bathroom was a 100-yard stroll outside.

I tell you these things to let you know that I simply cannot apologize for the place where we stayed in Greece, pictured below:

Methinks it was the Lord smiling on me as payment for my previous sufferings.  True, that’s one less heavenly reward since I’ve received it here on earth, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let me tell you that I love me some church planters.  These are people that give up not just a ten day stretch, but two years or more of their lives in order to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth.  During the Greece stay, I was privileged enough to cross paths with 600+ church planters serving everywhere from Spain to Ukraine; serving in countries where Christianity is cool to countries where sharing the Gospel will get you thrown out, jailed, or killed; serving in countries where their kids are in American school to countries where their kids are the only ones who speak English.

These people are hard-core, and it was my privilege to be able to serve them.  We met families who were weary and needed ten days’ worth of pampering and care.  We met families who gave back to us far more than we could ever give to them.  We met families who were at the beginning of their term of service and families who had served for fifteen-plus years.  We met single people serving solo and moms and dads with six daughters.  

One of the coolest things about the week was the Missions Auction.  This is an annual event where the stateside volunteers bring truly U.S. goodies (Oatmeal Cream Pies, IBC Root Beer, Skippy Peanut Butter) and the church planters bring crafts and goods from their country.  All items are auctioned, and 100% of the proceeds go towards world missions.

These peeps are as hard-core about their giving as they are about their serving.  Because this is their annual offering, many of them save up all year for the privilege to give, give in a fun way, and give big.  I saw a twelve pack of root beer go for $1000, and a handmade quilt went for $3260 – the largest single amount ever raised.  In the quilt story, one of the MK’s had asked her parents for that gift as her going-away-to-college present.  They had set aside $300, and were quickly disappointed when the bidding shot past that.  Some of the other families around them heard about it and started handing them cash so they could pick up the winning bid.

In all, well over $80,000 was raised for world missions.  I’m telling you, these people don’t play.  Here’s a picture of some of our people witnessing the madness:

Tomorrow: travel snafus.  

 

Greece Dispatch, Part 1

So about this time last year, Pastor J.D. was invited to speak at a gathering of church planters from all over Europe.  Being the kind soul he is (and willing to pick up on some heavy hints from yours truly) he invited me to come along and bring a team to serve and love on said church planters during their annual conference.  Last week, I joined fourteen other folks from the Summit in taking a little RDU love to the Mediterranean.  We partnered with churches from all over the U.S. to run everything from childcare to Vacation Bible School to medical clinics to family photography sessions to worship events, and it was awesome.  

Our first couple of days were spent touring Athens and Corinth before getting to work.  (The idea was that we wanted to give our worst days to jet lag and our best days to the people we were serving.)  Because of some travel glitches, my wife and my mother-in-law were late arriving to Athens; and because of some currency exchange glitches, I didn’t get to tour the very-cool Acropolis with the rest of my team.  Here’s a picture of me all by myself in front of the Parthenon:

By the way, nobody ever tells you that the Parthenon sits about 42 miles above sea level.  And the steps go straight up.  And there’s nowhere to buy water.  And there’s no elevator.  

Cradle of civilization, my foot.

On that first night in Athens, we ate unidentified meat at a sidewalk cafe.  But it was good unidentified meat.  At that point most of us hadn’t eaten in 14 hours, so we would have eaten the meat straight off of whatever animal it was…while the animal was still walking…and it would have been good.

Day two was spent in Corinth.  (Which is where the Corinthians lived.)  (Who were people in the Bible.)  Here’s a picture of me and my bride in front of some old rocks:

Greece is full of old rocks, all of which supposedly have historical value.  Tour guides could often be heard saying things like:

“Eef you look to your right you weel see very historical place that has much value to our contree.  On thees playce in long time ago, the foundation of democracee was eenvented.”

No, I don’t know why their accent came across so strong in that paragraph, it just did.  But we were able to see many historical sites, including:

• A portion of an archway that the Apostle Paul may or may not have walked under.
• A rock that Acquila and Priscilla may or may not have sat on.
• A Burger King where Socrates may or may not have been able to have it his way.

Coming tomorrow: arrival at the dumpy camp for the week.  Which also happened to be a beach-side resort.

 

Reasons I Hate Jet Lag

Yes, I promised that I would begin posting today about the great Greece adventure, and yes I know posts normally pop up by 7 AM, but I’m not feelin’ it, and here’s why…

1. For most people, jet lag makes them tired.  It makes me tired…and mean.
2. Very mean.  As in, nobody-likes-to-be-around-me-mean.
3. So mean that my wife called me out on it.  Which she should have.  
4. Which stinks because she was on the same trip and she’s tired too.  
5. But tired and nice, not tired and mean.
6. So mean that I asked a couple of co-workers to pray for me today.
7. And then wanted to critique their prayers.
8. Because I’m mean.

I wonder if you could zap me ahead by seven hours (which is the time zone my body just got used to) if I would be less mean?  Perhaps it’s my body detoxing from the two-per-day Magic Bars I ate (it’s a Greek thing…you wouldn’t understand).

But for now, I am undeniably, unequivocally mean.  So I shall spare you any further snarkiness, and promise to post some (nice) Greece news…beginning tomorrow.

 

Greece Week Begins…Tomorrow

I’ve spent the last ten…no…eleven days getting to Athens, Greece, working with 600 church planters and a team from the Summit, and now I’m typing this on my phone while standing in line at Logan Airport in Boston on Sunday morning trying to get BACK HOME.

I think I’ve slept a total of 8 of the last 60 hours, and have been wearing the same undies 100% of that time.

Editor’s Note: No. You. Didn’t. Just. Go. There.

Yes, I was scheduled to preach on Sunday morning. No, I didn’t make it. Thanks Charlie, for filling in. I’m glad the AM peeps didn’t have to suffer through any of my jet-lagged one liners!

Starting Tuesday I’ll have a recap of the week, complete with pictures and stories of what God is doing in Central an Eastern Europe. But for today, I’m going to reconnect with my family and GO TO SLEEP. Check back tomorrow!