Another year of Middle School Camp has come and gone, and what a week it was. Putting together a complete version of Footloose in just a week, sitting in condiment infested camping tents, stealing mascots, drinking chocolate milk, staying up way to late, and of course #absolutecommunity.

This year’s camp was centered around community, and specifically the originally coined term, “absolute community”. Absolute, meaning without limit, and community, meaning of group of like-minded individuals drawn together, therefore the idea that absolute community expresses is that a group of individuals that draw together with the like-minded goal to seek after God has no limits. When we gather in common pursuit of the Spirit of God, He will bless that pursuit, and with His blessing, there is no limit to the good things that can be birthed from such a community.

I believe if you asked any of the 150 young people that spent all week at Judson University, you will get 150 different, beautiful stories about the community that they have belonged to for the past week. A community where twelve and thirteen year olds are actually seeking to include, rather than exclude, where relationships are formed rather than broken by petty drama, where kids actually open up to adults about the things they are struggling with, and as a result, receive wise counsel. It may sound completely unfathomable, but I witnessed it with my own two eyes. And now that those 150 students have been released back into the real world, there is no limit to the good work that they can do because of the community with each other, and with God that they experienced this week.

So if you are a parent, or friend of a camper, talk to them about camp. Ask them what their experience was like, what happened to them, and what they learned. If they tell you they have nothing to share, they’re lying.

And if you’re a camper, and you experienced what it was like to live in a community with God at the center, then I encourage you to share what that was like with everyone around you, so that you might begin to create those types of communities in your home, in your school, and in your next Spotlight show. With the defining moment of Overnight Camp 2013 under your belt, there is no limit to the types of God centered communities that God wants to use you in. Share your experiences, tell your story. It’s important.

This week of camp reminded me a lot of my first week ever as a camper. It was the summer of 2005 and I was entering my freshman year of high school. That year we performed Grease. I had the time of my life all week, and on Thursday evening I experienced my first ever defining moment with God where I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. When I stood on stage, performing the showcase on Friday, I reflected on how much God had blindsided me that week. I had expected to perform and to play games, not to encounter God.  But as the final song came to a close and we all pointed up to the heavens, I noticed that right above the stage in the chapel there was a small window in the ceiling, something like a skylight. The way the rays of sunlight reached through it, it looked as thought God was stretching out his fingers toward us. Like he was pulling us into community with himself. I had never noticed that window before, I thought to myself, yet it’s been right above me the whole time.

Yesterday, I let the final applause go on for a bit before bringing the stage lights to blackout, hoping that these campers, nine years later, would have the same experience that I did looking up at that window, realizing that in absolute community, God is always there right above you. Even if it takes you awhile to notice Him, He’s right there, just waiting for you to look up. 

-jon

I was driving home pretty late the other night, past midnight, when I found myself stopped at the intersection in from of the new Rec Center on Randall between Route 72 and Huntley Road. I was a bit annoyed that the light was red. It was near one in the morning and no one was around to take advantage of the green light exiting the Rec Center. It closes at like, ten o’clock. Why do certain lights even run at night?

In a huff of tiredness, I slumped back in my seat and noticed the name of the exit road from the Rec Center. Recreation drive. I chuckled to myself, “couldn’t they come up with something a little more original? Surely we can be more creative than that.”

And then it hit me. I looked at the sign again. Recreation Drive. Recreation. Re-Creation. I saw the word in a whole new light. The word Recreation, broken down, is simply re-creation.

Thankfully no one was around, so I was saved the embarrassment of this late discovery. The light quickly changed and I accelerated slowly ahead, watching the revelatory sign disappear out of the top of my windshield. As I drove towards home, my tired feelings mysteriously left me, and the wheels in my head began to spin. This was so cool, I thought.

I began to think about God as the creator, and what a important part of his image that is. An important part that is often sadly overlooked. When I read at the Bible, I can’t help but believe that God’s creative nature is one of the most dominant and important attributes of His character. Otherwise, why would His first act as the God of the Bible be to create? Creation is what God starts with, therefore to create must be an integral part of who He is.

This is hard for many people to accept because not everyone thinks of themselves as a creative being. Not everyone thinks of himself or herself as an “artist”. I’m supposed to be created in the image of God, but I don’t have a creative bone in my body. To write, or to sing, or to sculpt is not my thing. But to think of art and creation simply in terms of how the world describes them is to rob the words of their true meaning.

On the other hand, something that most people find easy to accept is that we as humans need play. From our earliest age we find we need a release from the stress of day-to-day life. We need physical activity after sitting at a desk all day, we need to head out to the backyard and play catch, or ride a bike, or simply stand on the porch and chat. It is culturally accepted that it’s better to get up and take a walk, rather than to sit on the coach and eat potato chips. We call this physical activity, play, or in more technical terms, recreation. But if we break down that word into it’s two parts, we get re-creation, and we begin to see that our need for play is something that has been inbred into our souls, because it is within our moments of play, that we begin to reflect the image of God most strongly.

If God is a creator, and creation is His first act, then what could be more honoring to God than for His sons and daughters to engage in the act of creation?

When God first created the heavens and the earth, He created light, and stars, and plants, and humans. These are physical things, with physical limitations. But go one level deeper and you will see that God not only created the physical world, but the potential world. In creating light, he created the potential to see and experience beauty. In creating plants, he created the potential to breath oxygen and be given life. In creating man and women, he created the potential for relationship and for love. The potential world has no boundaries, not limitations.

Creation is not about the act of creating something physical. It is about all the potential for good that lies within that physical creation. God placed a desire inside of us for play. And when we as children of God begin to fulfill our need for recreation, we begin to harness and experience all the potential goodness of God’s original creation. We are re-creating what God has already put in place, and in doing so, we begin to live a life without boundaries, without limitations.

To be a creative being does not require ‘talent’ or ‘training’ or ‘artistry’. To be a creative being requires that you answer the call deep inside that says, “Come out and play. Come out and engage in the re-creation of laughter, of joy, and of light. Come and experience the world without limits.”

-jon

I went on a prayer walk the other day near one of my favorite parks. The weather reports told me that the storm of the century was coming, so I figured I should make it a quick one. I was about to wrap up when I circled around the side of a baseball diamond and saw that a team of guys around my age were practicing. As a former baseball player, I always enjoy the chance to stop and watch some ball. And I’ll admit, I may have been secretly thinking to myself, “If I hadn’t quit when I was younger, I’d be just as good as these guys, probably better.”

The rain clouds loomed more and more ominously with every passing minutes, so practice winded down shortly after I started watching. When the team broke their huddle and headed over to the side where I was standing, I caught the eyes of two, familiar looking players. It took me a second, but soon I realized that they were former teammates of mine from my youth travel baseball days. With practice being over, I hopped the fence and jogged over to talk with them.

They looked generally the same way they did when they were thirteen, just a bit older, and with more scraggily facial hair. We spoke for a few minutes, catching up on life, talking about the MLB. They were attending small junior colleges, playing ball there, and trying to finally figure out a major. I told them about acting and graduation, and that sports we strictly a hobby now. I’m sure they were waiting for me to explain why I was walking around their baseball practice with a Bible in my hand, muttering to myself. But I figured that my transformation from baseball jock to theatre nerd had already set them off balance enough.

After a few minutes, we looked up at the black, thundering clouds and decided that it was time to go, so I wished them good luck and we said our farewells, promising to take some time this summer to hang out and catch up some more. As I drove home through the rain that night, I couldn’t shake this one thought out of my mind. “How could they still be playing baseball?”

Now I have no vendetta against organized sports. I love sports. In fact, not playing varsity high school sports is something I look back on with great regret. But what you must understand is that I am a victim of over exposure to youth athletics. Baseball started for me when I was four years old. I played a year of T-ball, which proved too easy for me, so when I was five, I had moved to the seven year old coach pitch division, and by the time I was seven, I was playing with nine year olds in full-on little league. From that point, I decided that in house play wasn’t enough for me, so I ventured into the world of travel teams. From the time I was nine until I was fifteen, I played sixty to eighty baseball games, every summer. Not including fall ball, and winter workouts. Winter workouts for twelve year olds, you ask? Yes, personal trainer and all.

Needless to say, by the time I got to high school, I was completely worn out. I looked at these guys, now in their twenties, still playing ball, and probably playing more games then we ever played as kids, and it just didn’t click for me. I couldn’t imagine myself still putting in the long hours at practice and in the batting cage and at pitching lessons, because somewhere along the line, the game had stopped being fun, and when it stopped being fun, I stopped wanting to play.

While baseball is something that is in my past, and youth athletics is something I plan to be very selective and careful with for my children, I do not regret the memories and the friendships that I formed during those long travel summers. Nor the lessons I learned from being a part of a team.

In my backpack, at all times, I keep a regulation size baseball. This is not to pour salt in the wound of my “could have been” baseball career, but rather, it is to remind myself that as an artist and as a man of faith, I never want to lose my sense of play, as I did on the baseball diamond. In the game of collaboration and creative art, there is no winner and loser, there is no right and wrong, there is just pure play. I hope to never get so serious, that to create art becomes nothing but work. Because it is from a playful heart that genius takes root and beauty begins to grow. I think that’s maybe why Jesus calls us to have a childlike faith. Children are constantly in tune with their sense of play; and because of that, they see the world through a different, more dynamic, brighter lens then the rest of us who have stopped playing the game for fun and have started playing for money, power, clout, or any other worldly gain.

The pursuit of sincere creation starts with a willingness to pick up the ball and begin to play. This is how art and creativity has been developed since the beginning of time, through a willingness to experiment, and an unwillingness to accept anything as failure or loss. It’s just like Albert Einstein says, “I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways it hasn’t worked.” I believe that if everyone viewed art this way, instead of some serious, dark, suffering, professional experience, we would begin to tap into undiscovered wells of creativity that God has divinely interwoven into our souls from the day we were created in the secret place.

So lighten up, and play. After all, it’s just a game. 

-jon

Towards the beginning of Luke 11, Jesus, as he does, casts out a demon that was living inside of a mute man, freeing him to speak for the first time. You know, like you do. All in a days work. No big deal. The crowds around him, however, seem to be less than amused, as they begin testing him, asking for a sign from heaven. (Luke 11:14-16)

This is something of a theme for the crowds that follow Jesus. (Mark 8:11, Matthew 12:38) Time and time again in the Gospel we read about the crowds or the Pharisees, “demanding a sign from heaven”. It’s like they’re saying to Jesus, “if you could just give us a clear sign, an obvious miracle, then we could believe that you are the Son of God.”

I find it almost humorous in this particular passage, because the crowds are asking for a sign directly after Jesus has caused a mute man to speak right before their eyes. I mean, is that not miraculous enough? What more are you looking for? In fact, Jesus performs some pretty incredible miracles all throughout his ministry. Water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, Holy Spirit as a dove. Not to mention raising not only himself, but also Lazarus from the dead. How much more of a miracle are we looking for here?

There’s just one problem. These miracles, while miraculous, were not the miracles these people were looking for. The culture in Jesus’ day had a very specific expectation of what the Son of God would look and act like. At this time in history, God’s people are once again, under the tyranny of a harsh regime, the Hold Roman Empire. Now in the past, when God’s people had been in this sort of situation, God had sent a mighty warrior like Joshua or David with a big sword to fight battles and overtake the enemy. Or he had sent someone who would perform miraculous signs, like Moses and the ten plagues. Jesus, a carpenter turned Rabbi who hangs out with fisherman and tax collectors, did not exactly fulfill those expectations. And I can’t help but wonder if the people in Jesus day were so obsessed with their expectation of the way God should look, that they were blinded from seeing the Savior of the world right in front of them, and they missed him.

That crowd in Luke 11 is so caught up in their expectation of what a miracle from God should look like, that they missed the miraculous healing that had been performed right in from of their eyes.

I’m glad we live in a culture that is nothing like that. That would be terrible. Could you imagine?

Our culture has many expectations for how God is “supposed” to work. We subscribe to the idea of Karma, that if I do good, then good things will happen to me, and if I do bad, then bad things will happen. We view a relationship with God and the church as a consumer relationship, the more I give, the more I will be blessed. We view being a “good person” as synonymous with “being a Christian”.

If these are the expectations we place on God, it’s no wonder most of us are disappointed by him and doubt his existence and sovereignty, because to fulfill those expectations would be outside of his character. The truth is that a relationship with God is a covenant relationship, based on a promise, and the acceptance of the gift of free grace, given and earned by the blood of Jesus on the cross. His sacrifice has set us free from our sinful nature and is calling us into a new, more fully lived life. If we are looking for God to act in any other way then that, not only will we be sorely disappointed, but we may also miss the glorious miracles and blessings that are taking place all around us, everyday. We cannot allow our expectations of how God should work to blind us from seeing the beauty the he is orchestrating in and throughout our lives.

The unsearchable depths of his loving heart is the place where expectation goes to die, and a new word, a new day, a new life is born.


-jon

As I continue to live(what a beginning to a sentence) I begin to realize that certain seasons of life coincide with certain themes. I find myself walking into church services or listening to sermons or getting into conversations that are all seemingly unrelated, and yet I end up talking and learning about the same thing, the same theme. Lately that theme has been, how to live as a Christ follower within society. As I felt God continually confronting me with this topic, I thought it might be helpful to consult the scriptures. That’s what all the pastors keep telling us to do these days.

I went first and foremost to teachings of Jesus. Jesus was a mastermind of the old adage, “being in but not of the world” so I figured his would be pretty sound advice.

As one would imagine, I found an overflow of information on the subject. One of the main reasons God came down, other than His death of the cross and the redemption of the world, was, I believe, to give us a living example of what it looks like to bear the image and light of God to those around us. As I was digging through, a few passages stuck out at me in ways they never had before. Things I’ve read a hundred times, and I’m still getting something new out of them. Isn’t the Bible cool?

The first passage was about welcoming little children. In Luke, Jesus talks about those who welcome in the little children also welcome him, and whoever welcomes him, welcomes the one who send him. (Luke 9:48) Two new things struck me about this passage. One, the context is very important; because these days, what kind of sick person would turn away a child? In our society, we love kids, we view them as cute, valuable, special, in need of love and care. But in Jesus day, children, especially poor children, were often treated as outcasts, much like a leper or a prostitute would have been. They were not considered citizens, or functioning members of society. With this in mind, I don’t believe that Jesus is limiting this command to just children. Rather, I think he‘s using the example of children to point us to a greater, more broad vision, the welcoming in of all those who had been cast out, and whom we are called to love, serve, and welcome in. It’s not just about children, it’s about those around us who are in need of mercy, community, and life-change.

I then wondered about the second half of the statement. The promise, that when we welcome the children, we also are welcoming him and welcoming the one who sent him, God. I used to think of this like I was doing God a favor by being welcoming to others. Like by being loving to them, I was being loving to God. This may be true, but if God is who he says he is, I don’t think he’s looking for any handouts or favors from little old me. I believe what the verse is saying, is when you lovingly engage in the lives of those who are broken and cast out, you invite God into those circumstances and relationships to do his redemptive work. By welcoming the outsiders, you are saying, “I invite your Spirit into my life, Lord, to help me shine your light in their lives and give you the ultimate glory you deserve.” When we love others, we are welcoming the presence of God into our lives. How’s that for living as a Christ follower in society?

I then moved, as if by divine intervention, to the parable of The Good Samaritan. After all, who walks and talks the Christian faith as much as the Samaritan man in that story? This time, as I read, it wasn’t the details of the story itself that began to press my God buttons, but rather the context in which Jesus chooses to tell the story. When I read around the story, I realized that Jesus is telling the story in order to teach one of the “experts on the law” what it means to love your neighbor. After the story, Jesus asks the man, “Now which of these was a neighbor to the man in need?” In this grammatical context, a neighbor is not something you are, it’s something you do. You can’t be someone’s neighbor unless you are neighboring to that person. How do we neighbor to someone? The “expert on the law” tells us. When Jesus asks, he replies, “the one who showed him mercy.”

Being someone’s neighbor has nothing to do with the proximity in which you live to them. Being someone’s neighbor has everything to do with who is in need of mercy and care, and who is willing to answer that persons cry for help and welcome them in, thereby welcoming the presence of God into that relationship. The neighbor is the one who welcomes in the little children, the one who will not cross to the other side of the street to avoid a potentially awkward conversation, or to avoid falling behind on their daily agenda. The neighbor is the one who kneels down, shows grace, mercy, and takes neighbor from a noun to a verb. 

-jon