Connecting

Char and I had the chance to be with many of her family this weekend as we attended the wedding of Char’s younger sister “Bert.”  It was really nice to see and be with people that you don’t get to see all that often.  People can seem more wonderful when you are not around them all the time.  It was a great wedding though and it was a really fun reception, although I wasn’t feeling all that great so I missed out on much of the laughter and frivolity, I especially missed hearing my wife sing karaoke . . . that would have definitely been worth gutting it out . . . oh well, perhaps the next family wedding.  Having time alone allows you time to reflect on things that are going on in and around your life, and I had time to do a fair amount of reflecting, for which I am very grateful.  I spent a good deal of time thinking about church and what it means to care about what it looks like.  It seemed to me, in my reflective moments, that there is an awful lot of time and energy put into working on what church should “look like” and not quite so much time spent of what the church, collectively and individually, should actually be doing.  We have created our own sub-culture vocabulary, and we are careful so that it doesn’t sound too much like the traditional church’s vocabulary, (with good reason); we talk about how things ought to be; but at the end of the day we have talked about doing and we have spent countless hours discussing form, and precious little missional stuff comes out of it all.  Maybe that’s what happens when you don’t feel well and your lying in a hotel room in Chicago . . . maybe you get delirious and all this thinking is convoluted hogwash . . . how’s that for a trendy term?