bicycles and hitting the downhills

Wesley has hit Christmas a little early early this year since we got him (and us) a child's bicycle seat. We figured it'd be silly to wait until December when it is too cold and icy to ride, so we've been enjoying it the past few weeks. We keep the bikes and seat ready to go in our SUV since we have the space and our garage is occupied with materials for my climbing wally. So far Wesley seems to like the box most of all. It forms an awesome tunnel to craw through and a formidable tower to smash and knock over. Hillary and I have definitely enjoyed the times we've been able to take him out for rides, though it is a little different getting used to the weight distribution near the back of the bicycle. With him on the bike I cruise even faster on the downhills, but I need to be even more in control.
With ministry as of late I feel like it is an interesting mix of terrain. Sometime I'm peddling hard to make it up a long incline and am surprised to find that it evens out sooner than I thought. At other points I think I get to cruise and instead it is a long uphill push. At our prayer meeting last night one of the people praying was referring to Isaiah 6 where Isaiah says, "Here I am. Send me." She confessed that for a while she had been saying, "I'm here..." non-chalantly and had a growing sense that she must say, "Here I am!" I could identify with what she said and I think God has been teaching me to be more deliberate and purposeful in my work. I've been thinking more and more about leadership and have been asking God to lead me to be a leader. I think he is taking me along that path.

undoing prejudice

It is really easy to get frustrated when road work or similar public works projects take longer than expected. But as I think about my home projects, especially building this climbing wall in my garage, it makes perfect sense. I've had my second three hour set of construction (with others helping of course) and progress is painfully slow. I'm not handy and this is more complicated than I thought it would be - yikes!
This kinda relates to the idea of prejudice but not really. Some it has to do with looking down on others as inept or "less," when I am lenient with myself when the same things happen. The reason prejudice is on my mind, is the sermon our pastor preached yesterday. James 2:1-4 talks about favoring the rich over the poor and when you look more intently at your life you can see all this preferential treatment that you extend to others, based on what you value. It is one thing to identify prejudice in your life and a whole other to root it out. I've been thinking as to how Jesus undoes the prejudices within us all. While a lot of things came to mind, here are the two big ones.
First, he undoes our need for prejudice. We look down on others to lift ourselves up. When we know the love Jesus has for us, despite being undeserving, we don't need to make our way up in the world by stepping on others. Second, he gives us a common object of love. When we are loved by God we love him in return. One of things that unites people is a common love. Random people in a football stadium can experience a deep sense of unity and oneness as the cheer for the same team. and a few things come to mind. Instead of loving ourselves, our position, our power, reputation, or all other sorts of things we love God and this love will unite us with all sorts of other people who love the same God.

Babie and Apples

Last week, over the course of about 72 hours there were three babies born to families in our church. It was a fun and exciting time checking my email and seeing announcements of names, weights, lengths, and gender continue coming in. Since our Sr. Pastor is out of town teaching I got to do the visits with the families and it has been fun. In the midst of the various birthings we also ended up with the two year old son from one of the families. We were planning on going apple picking that day so we took him along, and he and Wesley had a blast. They both loved yanking the apples off the trees - we ended up picking ~30lbs. I started munching on one of the apples I picked and the boys both wanted some, so I bit off the skin and let them give it a try. They were both liked biting the apple and kept getting closer and closer to me as they wanted to eat more the apple. It was a great time. The rest of the week was pretty nuts, between a youth overnight, preaching on Sunday, and visiting mom's in the hospital. I'm glad that this week is going to be more low key.

NYC, Boston... Paris, Milan...

This was a week of city hopping for Hillary as she was in NY on Wednesday and Boston on Friday and Saturday. I was joking with her about where she would be next week and we agreed it should be Paris, Milan, and Barcelona. Hillary went to New York with my mom and sister to see wicked (her birthday present). Then the two of us were in Boston for a conference called, "From Embers to a Flame," which focused on church revitalization. So here's the summary of our experiences:
1. Hillary liked Boston more than New York (it was interesting to visit both in the same week) and we could see ourselves in Boston at some point in life. Who knows whether it will happen, but Saturday was an amazing fall day and the church hosting the conference was right on Boston Common.
2. Revitalizing churches is just as important as starting new ones. This seems kinda obvious, but I learned a lot about this concept of revitalization and it gave me a lot to think about.
3. Wesley generally behaves well when we leave him with others. This was our first time away together since we had Wesley and it went well. We need to do this again, except go away for vacation and not a conference.
4. There were about 20 of us at this conference from our church and it will be great to get together and process all the different things we were learning about. There were various points for reflection interspersed between the teaching sessions and I'm looking forward to hear what other people learned and how we can synthesize this into a coherent whole so we can move forward as a church.