Decisions

It's been a while since I've written on this thing. I guess I just got so busy with life that I actually forgot it existed. It seems hard to keep everything straight these days. Life just seems to fly by and there is never enough time to do everything that needs to get done. I just remembered that I have this blog and decided to update anyone who still checks it on what life decisions we are being faced with right now!

We are still in Vernon and we love it here. I'm just scared that there is not much in terms of career advancment in Vernon. My job is fine for now, but the funding might very well be up at the end of February 2007. After that, I don't know if I have a job or not. With this in mind, we're always thinking of what God has in store for us next. Some ideas we've had are to become Officers in The Salvation Army. I strongly believe that that is where we'll end up someday so why not just do it now and get it over with!! Another idea is to move back to Vancouver Island to attend university so I can finish off a degree in Criminology and get a job as a youth probation officer. I'd do it on the island because there is no Criminology programs in the Vernon area or full degrees online (if you find one, let me know. It obviously has to be a Canadian institution, preferably BC). We could also just stay in Vernon and hope that my job will be here next year, or I could get a job in the labour force and possibly not enjoy it very much, plus definately not make as much as I do now, which would be difficult. There is also possibly a youth pastor position opening up at the church I grew up in, in Port Alberni in the next few months. I will consider applying to this if it is where I feel God is calling me and my family.

Anyway, it is very hard to make decisions like this and I wish that I didn't have to make them. But we do, and we continue to trust that God will bless us no matter what or where we serve, as long as we're serving Him and being obediant to Him.

Thanks for listening. If you have any thoughts as to what we should do, send me a comment.

Cheers,

Neil

God's Word

Man it's been a long while since I've written anything on this blog. Life is so busy that I forget most of the time that I even have it. Anyway, here it goes for today.

The other day I was in the 24/7 prayer room that Pathways, my church plant has opened up. I was doing a Lectio Divina (Sacred Reading) excercise which is an excercise where you listen to God through the reading of His word. Man, did God ever give me a kick in the pants. I was reading Psalm 23... The Lord is my Shepard...etc. As I was reading it, I was stopping to reflect on each promise that God was giving us. In the midst of reading it, I decided to sing it in praise to God. After I was done reading the passage a few times, I just sat and listened for the still, silent voice. All of a sudden, into my head popped three chapters of the Bible. The first was Hebrews 4, then 2 Timothy 2, finally Romans 10. So I cracked open my Bible to these chapters and read them. In each of the chapters, God spoke to me about His Word being alive and active. Hebrews 4:12-13 says: "For the Word of God is alive and active; sharper than any double edged sword, it penetrates to dividing soul and spirit, joint and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account." This really spoke to me about how reading His Word really will bring you closer to Him. I've been doing terribly lately at reading the Bible, but after God spoke to me through this, I've been doing better. Why wouldn't we want to read His Word. If that is one of His primary communication tools to us, we should utilize it and listen to Him from the words that we read. In 2 Timothy 2:9b says "But God's Word is not chained". Paul was explaining that he is writing his gospel even when he is chained. Romans 10:17 says: "Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ". This just tied up what God was saying to me: Faith comes through reading His Word.

Anyway, time is running out for me to finish, but I just wanted to encourage people to really sit and focus on a small passage from the Bible. Read it over and over again and really focus on what God is saying to you through it. Listen for that still, silent voice. He still speaks to us, just like He spoke to Elijah on the mountain.

Cheers.

Congrats Canada!!

I meant to post this the other day (when the Olympics were over) but I didn't have a chance. I just wanted to say how proud I am about how well Canada did at the Olympics this last month. If fourth place finishes were included on the podium, I'll bet that we would have had the most medals. Great job Olympians!! Can't wait till 2010 when we will show the world what we're really made of!!

When I saw some of the gold medalists being interviewed, I realized that this was it for them, they had achieved everything they had set out in life to do. Now what, I wondered. After the excitement of it all wears off will they find themselves wondering 'now what?'?

I was thinking about how great it would be if every believer had the same determination as the Olympic medalists, except for that their only goal in life was to live a life of Christlikeness, getting gold medals in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Everybody knows what these are... The Fruit of the Spirit. Wow, could you imagine a church body that only used these characteristics!! We wouldn't have to deal with politics, unforgiveness, unjustified critisism. We wouldn't be without mistakes but if we truly have Christ, we will be willing to take responsibility for our mistakes and apologize. We would all be about loving each other and others, and with love comes the rest of the fruits of the spirit. If we have true love, then we truly have Christ working through us.

Please continue to pray that I will be able to show all the fruits of the Spirit to my family because as of late, I have been failing to do so and I don't like it!! Also pray that my baby Benjamin will start to sleep better so that we can all get some rest. I am taking him to a Chiropractor today to see if that will help.

Take it easy today and really try to reflect on Galations 5:19-26 and see which category you find yourself living in now. Unfortunately, upon reflection I found myself relating to the list of sins more than the fruit.

Cheers

Missional Cafe

As a main part of Pathways (the church plant that I am involved in) we are excited about opening up a 'missional cafe'. I have removed the name of the cafe because we want the first 'google' spot to be for the official website and right now it is for my blog. The main focus behind this cafe is to connect with people primarily the ages of 13-30 (this doesn't mean we are leaving older people out, we are simply decorating and having the feel of the place focused on attracting the younger generation). We will be offering fair trade products (simply put, we are buying the coffee and other products from overseas at a price that will enable them to make a profit). Most other places who offer fair trade coffee (ie. Starbucks) have only one blend that is fair trade and the rest they pay peanuts for. As well as being a coffee house where we will interact and meet new people, it will also be our place of worship. In October, we will be returning to weekly or bi-weekly worship services where all the cell groups come together in corporate worship. Currently we meet every 6-8 weeks at some random location. This will be great to be able to go to the Cafe.



Anyway, please pray that all goes well with getting the Coffee House up and running and that we will be successful at it.

Cheers

Be the Church, don't go to Church!

My dad's blog inspired me to write this one. I actually wrote it as a comment on his blog but decided to publish it myself. The link to my dad's blog is on the side called Tim Thompson...Reflections. In his blog entitled "What is a church?" he talks about two other blogs about the subject and explains a little bit about his experience. This brief blog is a little bit about my experiece with what the church is. I hope you enjoy.

Church to me is the people that belong to it (I know I say this all the time and my family is probably getting sick of me saying it). It is not the building where we meet, it is not the living rooms or the golf course. Church is living the life that God has called us to live. I like the phrase "Be the church, don't go to church!". I myself have just recently left a big church of 400-500 people in the congregation to be a part of a cell based church plant in a smaller community. From my experience, I am growing in my spiritual journey better now than I did at the big church. I feel more connected with fellow believers, I find it easier to share my faith and invite people just to 'hang out' instead of inviting them to a worship service that will most likely be very boring to someone who hasn't experienced Christ yet. Learning how to "Be the church" is helping me live my life for Christ everyday as opposed to the 'rut' that some people get in by just living the life on Sunday's.

This being said, I also believe that everyone and every demographic is different so what works for me and my community doesn't necessarily work for another. I think that every community, small or large, should have options for people to meet God the way in which they feel most comfortable. If someone you meet doesn't feel comfortable going to a worship service, invite them out for golf or coffee and just love them.

I believe as Christians (even if we attend regular services in a 'church' building) need to really focus on living the life, not just on Sunday's, but everyday. Be the church on the golf course, be it at the mall or in the grocery store. Be the church all the time!!

Thanks for reading my ramblings.

God in the OT!

Well, it sure has been a while since I wrote on this blog. I find myself not even remembering that it even exists. I remembered today so I decided to write one.

I've been reading through Numbers (something about it interested me, I don't exactly know what!!) and I am finding it quite interesting to hear about the stories of the Israelites in the desert. Today I was reading the story in Numbers 11 when God sent the quail to the Israelites.

When the people of Israel were wailing because they only get manna and no meat, Moses approached the Lord and asked that He lift the burden of all these complaining people off of him and put it on many people. So God did as Moses asked. He put the spirit that was upon Moses on seventy other elders in Israel. Then God told Moses to tell the people that He will send them meat for 30 days, until they were sick of it. Interestingly, Moses questions God on how He is going to do this. Moses says to God, "Here I am among six hundred thousand men on foot, and you say, 'I will give them meat to eat for a whole month!' Would they have enough if flocks and herds were slaughtered for them? Would they have enough if all the fish in the sea were caught for them?" (Numbers 11:21-22). To which God responds, "Is the LORD's arm too short? You will now see whether or not what I say will come true for you." (Numbers 11:23). I find it crazy that Moses, who sees the manna fall from heaven everyday and who has been through the many miracles that God has performed to get them to where they are at this point, still has doubts as to what God can do. Anyway, the next day God sends an enormous amount of quail for the Israelites to gather and eat. They were piled three feet high and for as long as they could walk in one day!! WOW, that's a lot of meat! Then God did something that is a bit confusing to me and the reason behind this blog. He sent a severe plague among the people of Israel and killed many because they craved other food.

My confusion is this: Why did God not just say no and tell them to be content with the manna that He sends them everyday. Why did He have to give them what they asked for but then kill some of them because they were greedy. To me, this doesn't really sound like the loving God that I know. It seems kind of cruel if you ask me. It seems like God is saying, "OK, I'll give you what you ask for, but I'll kill you because you asked for it."

As it confuses me as to why God chose to do it this way, it definately teaches a very important lesson on selfishness. It teaches me not to ask for something out of selfish desires, and to always be grateful for what God has given to me. Praise Him who gives us immeasurably more than we will ever deserve!!

Just thought I'd share my thoughts for today with you!!

Love

Last night in our small group we were discussing what love is and what the Bible tells us it is. We looked at scripture we came up with many different questions and scenarios. Where it says, Love your neighbour, we asked what does that mean to love your neighbour. Who is your neighbour. Another question that we asked was how do we love God with all our mind, soul and strength? What does it mean when the Bible tells us that if someone takes something of yours, let him have it. Does that mean that if I stole your digital camera, you would just let me take it? Or would you wrestle me and take it back? Is that love? Where do you draw the line. Obviously God doesn't call us to be walked all over like a bunch of idiots. So how do we let someone walk. What does it mean to seek justice and not revenge?

There were many more questions that we came up with that I can't remember right now (I should've written them down). Anyway, if anyone wants to give their opinion on this subject, feel free to leave a comment.

I feel that to love others we must be willing to go the extra mile for them. Some examples are: helping someone move furniture into their new house; or taking care of someone's kids for a night; or just simply listening to someone who needs a friend. Now, it's all fine and good if we do these things, but is it really love if we do them with a bad attitude, or really can't stand the person but we'll do these actions anyway because God tells us to? I think to acquire true Godly love, we must do things for others with a willing heart and spirit. Not thinking about ourselves, but always have what's best for others in mind.

How do we love God with all our mind? This one was one of the trickiest questions we discussed. Does He mean to keep our thoughts pure. Does it mean we must always be thinking about Him. The thought that I had was that it is not necessarily thinking constantly about Him, but in everything you think or do, we must excercise discernment. We must constantly be conscious of what we are doing and thinking. We must be aware that what we are doing is Godly.

Who is your neighbour? We determined that our neighbour is everyone we meet or cross paths with. We must be loving toward everyone. To love our friends, we determined that a good way was to keep them accountable to actions in their lives. If a Christian brother or sister is blatently sinning, we should call them on it no matter the consequences. This is not an easy thing to do!

The whole 'let the person who took your thing, take it' was a hard one to wrap our minds around. We didn't really come up with an explaination as to what we should do in these circumstances. We toyed with the idea that if you see them do it, try to get it back nicely, but if you don't see them do it, don't accuse someone of doing it and don't try to hunt them down to get it back. Who know's what we should do?

Anyway, gotta get back to work. Thanks for reading my ramblings.

Where is God?

Sometimes in the midst of extremely difficult circumstances we get a feeling that God isn't listening to our prayers and our cries to Him. Of course we know that this isn't true, but it makes you wonder why He is not answering your prayer the way you want it to be answered.

For instance, this last week my youngest son, Benjamin, who is 7 months old today, has not been content at all to sleep in his crib at night. The only time he is content and able to sleep is in our arms and a lot of times it is only in our arms when we are sitting up, so it's not like we can always lay down with him. Over the last 7 nights sleep my wife and I have probably got a total of about 3 hours sleep each per night and even this sleep is not restful because it comes in pockets of half and hour to an hour at a time until Ben wakes up crying again. We've tried everything we can think of to help him. He's developed a severe rash on his forehead and behind his ears which irritate him with constant itches. We've put cream on it, flax oil on it, given him camomilla drops, and have him sleeping on a magnetic mat (which is supposed to help balance out the ions in your body and help you to feel less pain and be relaxed). We aren't sure what's caused it. The doctors tell me it's Exema (or however you spell it) which makes sense because I have Exema too and it's a genetic thing. Anyway, needless to say that my wife and I are extremely tired and irritable due to this challenging time.

We pray over and over every night for God to allow Ben to relax so that he could get sleep and we could get sleep. Time and time again we cry out to God and ask that He help us, but God never seems to answer our prayer. Why?

Maybe God is trying to teach us a lesson. What is the lesson that He wants us to learn? Maybe to pray without ceasing, knowing that God is still there. Maybe He wants to see how much faith we have in Him to see us through. Maybe He wants to teach us that even through our challenges, we still have a very fortunate situation because our children don't have any major illness that they will battle until they die (we are very blessed in that way). I don't know exactly what God is trying to teach us, but I do know that even though He doesn't feel like He's working in our situation, He is in complete control.

We just have to keep trusting in Him for strength to get through, knowing that He always know's what's best for us in the long run.

Please keep us in your prayers as this is a challenging time for us. Thank you,