Glorious Mud

I have been reading through Ezekiel this month. And just for the record - this is one crazy book. Man, Ezekiel had one rough gig. I am tempted to complain when I run a 12 hour day of meetings. You know, rough stuff - St. Louis Bread Co. can get seriously old. Ezekiel, on the other hand, had to act out all these crazy judgments from God before they happened. He was God's living parable. He had to sit in a public square and build miniature cities out of bricks and then destroy them. He had to lay on his side in public for 390 days and then roll over and lay on the other side for 40 more days. He had to cook his food over human feces - well, until God recanted and allowed him to cook it over cow poop. And that is just the start. Ezekiel had it rough. But he was God's man. He loved God and he loved God's people and he was willing to suffer so that God's grace could come and bring repentance and restoration to people near to God in religious behavior but far from God i

Church services are a lot of work to pull off. It doesn't matter if you attend a mega-church with a disneyland like children's ministry and performing monkeys onstage or a rural church of 100 people. Unless you attend a house church in your own home with no other families with kids, you will probably be confronted with the need at some point to recruit people to help you pull everything together for a church gathering. When I came on board with The Journey in 2006, I was immediately hit with the need to recruit enough volunteers to staff a new service (we were, at that point, moving from three to four services). I had a leadership team I was already developing - but I needed around 40 warm, caring, entertaining, and energetic bodies - and I needed them quickly. The problem was compounded by the fact that I didn't even have enough people to cover all the needs at the other services. So, I put in a request to God. I asked him, if he wouldn't mind, slowing down the gr