So it's March now. I know, I know, I am Captain Obvious. But since Easter happens in March this year, and then since the end of March is just a couple short months from our major summer Block Party, and then, and then, and then....
But instead of looking ahead, these blogs are always opportunities for me to look back. So I'm going to look back on the weekend that was and then figure out how to deal with the next few months once I'm finished here. I seem to remember Jesus having something to say about this, something like "do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself."
This weekened kicked off for me with the arrival of our new church sign on Friday morning. We've been in the process of working on this sign for a couple of years now - there's a lot of boring back story to it - so it was really great to finally see it go up on the posts. I know it sounds rather corny to celebrate a sign, but for years we've been a somewhat nondescript, invisible building, and our hope is that a new sign with service times and a website address will help us do a better job of reaching out to our community and inviting them in than we've done before.
Of course a sign outside the building does nothing to help the community if what's happening inside the building doesn't connect. And this week we talked about maybe one of the hardest areas for people to connect with God around: our minds. For lots of people their minds are a huge barrier to trusting in God. I get it because I have a ton of questions about God myself - I want to know how everything happened, when it happened, and if there's some way to logically prove that God exists. I want answers that make sense to my brain, and when I don't find them, it creates some tension inside of me.
But as I've followed Jesus for years of my life, I've learned that he is not uncomfortable with us engaging our brains in the pursuit of relationship with him. In fact, in the great command he tells us that we should engage our mind in loving God. We should learn to think deeply about him, learn to open up our understanding to the possibility of his truth being revealed to our lives. When we do that, we get into what Paul describes in Romans 12 as the transformation of our minds. It's not only a transformation of what we think about, but how we think about the world around us.
As our minds are being transformed and renewed, we learn to test and prove out God's good, perfect, and pleasing will for our lives. And no matter how skeptical you might be about following Jesus, the idea that it might be possible to understand God's purpose for your life should be enough to at least create a little tension in you around that possibility. I want us to continue to be the church where that mental tension is created - where you hear something on Sunday that bothers you enough on Monday that you would have to go to the Scriptures and read it for yourself. I want to be the church that doesn't ask you to blindly accept what I say on Sunday just because I've got a platform and a microphone. I want you to challenge your mind, make yourself think, have conversations with people you disagree with. And then I want you to commit to opening up your mind to God's thoughts and purpose for your life.
You see, I'm convinced that to be a true follower of Jesus you have to engage your mind in a thoughtful pursuit of relationship with him. Contrary to popular opinion, the church (at least our church) is not meant to be a place where you check your brain at the door. Bring it along with you. Let it do the work God made it to do, but just be sure that you open it up to hearing what he has to say. You might be surprised at what happens when you do.
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