Blue Mountain

So for the past week I've been at my brother and sister-in-law's log home on Blue Mountain in Pennsylvania. As I write this I'm sitting on their deck looking at the budding trees and blooming flowers. . .oh yea, and I'm also dodging pesky bees that are about to scare me right inside. I like to think I'm much tougher about it than I am, but I'm not at all. I'm a wimp about bees and wasps.

Anyhoo, my brother goes to a new Wesleyan church plant. The pastor used to be a UM guy. He graduated from Asbury and did the whole itineracy thing for a while. He felt like God was calling him to plant a church, but his conference didn't give him as much freedom as he needed to do what he thought God was calling him to do so he left the UMC. I don't know why I mention that except that he is a really good pastor and very into the emerging church. It's a shame there wasn't room enough for his ministry in the UMC. That was a few years ago, so maybe things would be different today.

Thursday was the National Day of Prayer and the church was in the middle of a sermon series on prayer. That night they had a service that started with praise and worship music with an awesome band and then multi-sensory stations spread around the church--including a family friendly one where kids painted tiles and they built a mosaic wall of prayer. It was really, really cool. I've done prayer stations before, but this was the most seamless and meaningful for me. In one room we ate bread and drank water as we prayed for the world--that through us Christ would be bread and water for a hungry and thirsty world. That is still sticking with me.

"Pastor Dan's" (that's what they call him) last sermon in the prayer series talked about the power of blessing other people with our prayers. That's also sticking with me. He said that when someone tells us his or her story and we don't know how we can help or know that we can't do anything about the problem, that our first instinct should be to want to pray for them. I know a lot of people that I love very much and would really like to solve their problems. Pastor Dan said that I can't solve their problems, but I can point them to hope, peace, and reconciliation through prayer. I'm going to start doing that.

So, it's beautiful here and I love being with family. They have a new baby (Jordan Abigale--she's beautiful), so it's been crazy around here with a newborn and a toddler. One of them is always crying and waking up the other. I'm pretty sure they're about to kick Gracie and me out of the state.

More when I return to the southland in the springtime.