Let me begin this post by again offering congratulations to my friends in St Louis. The World Series win was certainly a great thing, but now, how about achieving the #1 ranking for America's most dangerous city? St Louis beat out Detroit, Compton and Camden! Philly's not even on the list. So I don't want to hear it from any of you St Louis people any more. When I was a youth pastor at Hope, parents would always freak out about being really safe on the overseas mission trips. I always said the most dangerous mission trips we took were to our own city -- guess I was right.
I realized a lot of you that read this weren't at Cornerstone the Sunday before I left for this immersion retreat, so you have no idea why I'm in Texas or Hawaii. I was selected to be a member of a team of six pastors from south-central PA sponsored by a scholarly grant from the Lilly Foundation to research how to lead and perpetuate missional churches and church movements. It is a two-week research project called an "immersion retreat" where we travel across the country and interview leaders who are currently leading missional churches and movements and glean information and principles to formulate a deeper understanding of missional leadership in order to be missional and transformational leaders ourselves. It's a great opportunity with lots of learning and community, and it's obviously sweet being in Hawaii to interview leaders at Kauai Christian Fellowship and New Hope Fellowship.
So, like I said earlier, writing about the full content of all that's going on with the learning side of things would be very unprofitable because it's essentially information overload and I'm going to need to process for a while. But I wanted to include my friends and family on the travel side of things.
A few weeks ago at Cornerstone, I taught John 4 -- Jesus and the Samaritan soman -- had everything to do with living water. I started off that teaching by talking about people who love water and are part fish, like my buddy Tim, he's a surfer dude. I on the other hand, do not like water. It's not that I'm afraid of it cause I'm a relatively strong swimmer. Saturday I went body surfing. This is me before going body surfing.
This is me after going body surfing.
One of the most painful experiences of my life. I was in the water with my friend, Dave and we got wrecked by this huge wave -- 20 feet high! (actually, my buddy Tim on the shore said it was about five feet high, but what does he know?). I lost my body board and ended up getting pounded into the sharp, lava hewn rocks making a huge divot in my leg and depositing large amounts of sand into my bathing suit -- very uncomfortable. I remembered once again why I don't do water: too much work and lots of pain.
October 29
Today was a cool day. Went to Kauai Christian Fellowship and spent the afternoon with its pastor, Rick Bundschuch talking missional leadership and ministry.
Sunday evening consisted of some very cool community time with the guys on the team.
Spiritually invigorating and draining.
October 30
Have some down time today and tomorrow before getting to New Hope Fellowship in Honolulu. So we went hiking today in an incredible canyon in Kauai.
After driving through the canyon, we hiked about one and a half miles back into the canyon to Waipoo Falls. They were intensely beautiful, as is all of Kauai.
No comments:
Post a Comment