Summit Semester Take Two

I don't have the words for an eloquent post. I've already tried twice. But I do have a lot of raw emotion I want to process here. So here are some random thoughts.

• I'm back at Summit Semester, visiting for a week. It's kind of weird. Good, but oh so different. And yet, it's so similar at the exact same time.
  
  
• One year ago today, I pulled away from Snow Wolf Lodge, tears streaming down my cheeks. Today, I'm hanging out with the awesome class of 2010, watching them process all of the emotions that come with their graduation week.
  
  
• Time is a funny thing. In some ways, Semester feels like it was a lifetime ago, almost like a dream. In other ways, it seems like it was just yesterday.
  
  
• I'm glad to be back at Snow Wolf Lodge, even without all the people my memories are associated with. I've spent a good deal of time just staring at the stars. I haven't really seen those in a year. There is peace, stillness, quietness that I haven't heard in a long time.
  
  
• As much as I love the geographic location of Snow Wolf Lodge, it's really the people that make Summit Semester. I miss the community of 2009. This morning I again hugged friends goodbye as they left to return to school after a whirlwind roadtrip. I'm grateful for the opportunity to linger a few days longer, but I wasn't prepared for how very different it feels with new nametags on the doors and different faces in the halls.
  
  
• That being said, I'm glad to get to know this class of 2010 at least a little bit. There are really great kids here. In some ways, nothing has changed. Some thirty young people have again gathered, absorbing all the knowledge their minds can hold, joyfully enjoying friendships, and asking the hardest questions of life. I've already had several great conversations, and I'm looking forward to more in the days to come.
  
  
• As I walked the road and looked at the stars the first evening we arrived, I was struck by something very significant. I'm not the same person that walked down this road a year ago. I distinctly remember one particular walk down that road with Naomi as I wrestled to understand what it means to trust God. A year later, the answers to "what's next" aren't any closer. But my heart is at peace. I can say with confidence that my God is good, and I can and will trust Him when I don't know where we're going.
  
  
• I can't express the impact Summit Semester made on my life. I learned so much and experienced a lot of growth. So I was almost surprised when God showed me something as I walked along the road. I've grown more in Carrollton this past year than I did at Semester. I guess in some ways that shouldn't be a surprise, but I wasn't expecting to discover that. This past year has been hard, in many ways. But having come to a milestone of this season of my life, I can look back and see growth that definitely wasn't here when I left SWL. (I've wrestled to trust God and know God this year, and I have grown in those areas. I might add that I haven't grown nearly enough, but that's part of life. When God is infinite and I am not, there is always more to learn.)
  
  
• Finally, I random came across a quote in the church bulletin from this morning that resonated with all of this. Jeff Daley, the pastor at Grace Church in Pagosa for many years, recently moved to a different town, and the church here is in a time of transition as they look for a pastor. In the bulletin they printed: "Please remember Pastor Jeff's wise departing words for us: 'What happens to us while we are waiting is more important than what we are waiting for.'"
  
  
• I have no idea "what I'm waiting for." But that's not the point. The point is that God has a plan, and His plan is good, because He is good. And He is working out His plan in me, even when it's hard or it seems like I'm stuck or I'm just frustrated and confused. He isn't wasting the "waiting times" of my life. Rather, it is through these very times that He is forming and transforming me into who He is calling me to be.

Dying Well

So after a brief hiatus, I'm kind of picking up where I left off. It's All Saints Day. In addition to having "For All the Saints" running through my head, I've been thinking about the cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. Really, more like one person in particular.

My grandmother taught me how to die. Now, she taught me many other things through her words and example. But she truly showed me what it means to die well.

Nanny, as all the grandkids called her, was in excellent health until the last few years of her life. These were very painful as she suffered severe osteoporosis and a host of other issues. Yet, as attested by her family and friends, she never complained. She always fought to regain her strength and be there for us, even as she experienced strenuous medical issues. After recovering from multiple falls, gall stones, and pancreatitis, she earned the nickname Energizer Bunny.

In her final months, she told us several times that she longed to go Home. She was ready to be with Jesus. But even still, she fought to live to the fullest in every moment she was given.

A few days before she died, my uncles were in her hospital room discussing sports. Nanny was fading, often in and out of consciousness and lucidness at that point. Yet she was well aware of one thing. "The Rangers lost. Lauren won't be happy." For a couple years, the majority of my summer nights were spent with Mom and Nanny, hanging out at her apartment, watching the Rangers, talking about anything and everything, and helping Nanny with her evening routine.

Tonight, the Rangers lost game five of the World Series, and I can't say I'm happy. But there are so many bigger things in life, matters of life and death, matters of eternity. Nanny lived out what it meant to trust God, even when life was living hell. She had a confident faith and a gracious strength. She never quit fighting, even to her very last days. On her 88th birthday, her whole family gathered in her hospital room. She told each one of us that she loved us and was proud of us. Two days later, God took her Home, and I'm sure she heard the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

May I strive for that, as she did, every day of my life, and may I live and die well, to the glory of God.

O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
All are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave, again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

Longing for the Fullness of the Kingdom

My heart has been heavy the past couple of days. The elementary principle at my old high school is on a ventilator in ICU. A freak incident at a football game - heatstroke leading to a internal temp of 107 - and his cognitive brain function may never recover, save an act of God.

There are times when I long so much for God's Kingdom that it almost hurts. We see part of it now - the Already. We know what God can do - heal and raise the dead to life - but we know that we don't always experience this in a fallen world. We long for the Not Yet - the second coming of Christ, when Death and all his friends will finally be destroyed, when all things will be made new. All nations and tribes and tongues will gather before the throne of God and sing His praises forever. The world will be how it's meant to be, how we long for it to be, because we will continually be in the presence of God.

Understanding the Christian worldview is so critical here. We have to understand that we live in God's Kingdom of the Now and the Not Yet. We still live in a fallen world, and because of what Jesus has already done, we're called to join Him in actively fighting evil. Yet we know evil and death and Satan ultimately won't be defeated until Jesus returns. We long for the Kingdom that is Not Yet fully here.

But we know the fullness of the Kingdom will come! All nations will stand before the throne of God and worship! God will fulfill His promise.

Of all the things I've learned from Perspectives, this one little snippet from Bryan Padgett has kept going through my head:

In the darkest night of my soul, I know this. I follow a God who is faithful to His promises and this is NOT where The Story ends! It may be where my story ends... but God will fulfill His promise.

Martyrs and Matters of Life and Death - Part 1

The Christian faith is just as much about death as it is life.

Yet, most American Christians have no idea what a good death is. Most of them probably think that's an oxymoron.

This is one of those 'tough questions that no one else is asking' that Summit Ministries is willing to address. And I'm grateful. At the Summit student conference this summer, one line that kept coming up was "Death is not the ultimate evil." One of the four major questions we ponder for three months at Summit Semester is "What is a good death, and what good is death?"

We have Life because of the Good Death - the death of the Son of God on a cross. And we are given this Life when we too die. I am commanded to daily pick up my cross and follow Jesus, for I am crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.

We don't really understand this in the American Church today. I think there are a couple reasons why, and I'll address these in upcoming posts.
1. Our culture doesn't understand death.
2. The prosperity gospel completely skews what life, death, and success really are.
3. The American Church doesn't understand real discipleship.
4. While we need to discuss death, we are not called to cultivate a culture of death like Islam.

I don't have the references, but this definitely stuck out to me in class Monday night. In the 1800s, waves of missionaries went to Africa, even though they knew the terrible statistics. 90% of missionaries would be dead within two years of arriving in Africa. Rather than shipping their goods in trunks, they packed their belongings in their own coffins. And yet missionaries continued to come, and slowly the Gospel spread. Ralph Winter, founder of the US Center for World Missions, commented that he didn't think his generation had the guts to do that. And if his generation didn't, mine certainly doesn't.

I'm not trying to be morbid or masochistic here, but this is not an issue that can simply be ignored. To quote Jim Elliot, martyred by the Auca/Huaorani tribe in Ecuador, "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."

Hope and Faithfulness

Lamentations 3

²¹ Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:

²² Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.

²³ They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

²⁴ I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him."

²⁵ The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;

²⁶ it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.

This passage comes in the middle of Lamentations, a book chronicling destruction like I can't even fathom. The dreams of a nation are dying with their city. And yet, God is good. God is faithful.

This passage makes my own doubt, fear, and questioning seem all the more insignificant. God will accomplish His purposes, even when all my expectations come crumbling to the ground, just as they did for Israel. God is faithful, and this is all that matters.

Hope In "Telling the World Its Own Story"

Our theme for this week is hope. There are times I desperately need to be reminded of the hope and triumph of the Gospel, and this article has become one of my favorite resources.

A couple of excerpts from "Telling the World Its Own Story" by Richard John Neuhaus:

The story of God's creating love; His preparing redemption for the world; His calling a chosen people and from this people raising up a Redeemer, the Messiah; His establishing an Apostolic community of faith, the Church, that would then reach out through all times and all places and all languages and cultures. This story bearing the promise of the telos — of the end — the destiny of the Cosmos itself and God's loving purposes for the world that He so loved that He gave His only begotten Son. This is the story of the world.

It is the story of everybody in the world. Our job is to alert people to their own story and to help them understand that everything that goes on in this world, all the dimensions of human activity — if they are rightfully ordered, if they are rightfully understood — are sacred, for they are all endowed with the presence of the God of creating and redeeming love who continues to be disposed to His creation, of which He once said, "Behold it is very good." So also He invites a return to that goodness and a fulfillment of that goodness in Jesus Christ.

We have to share God's love for the world. To have a Christian world view is to love the world.



All of us who have contended to be Christian disciples, to be faithful, know times in which we are tempted to despair and to feel that we are a part not only of a minority enterprise but a failing and perhaps definitively failed enterprise. But we have not the right to despair, for despair is a sin. And finally we have not the reason to despair, quite simply because Christ has risen. And this is the strength of a Christian world view, the strength of the Christian way of telling the story of the world: it has no illusions about it. All the other stories are built upon delusions, vain dreams, and utopias.



Hope is a virtue of having looked unblinkingly into all the reasons for despair, into all of the reasons that would seem to falsify hope, and to say, "Nonetheless Christ is Lord. Nonetheless this is the story of the world. Nonetheless this is a story to which I will surrender myself day by day." Not simply on one altar call, but as the entirety of one's life, in which every day is a laying of your life on the altar of the Lord Jesus Christ being offered up in perfect sacrifice to the Father.

The Kingdom of Hope

In class tonight, we talked about hope and the Kingdom of God. It wasn't mind blowing like last week's lesson, but it was a good class.

The Kingdom is obviously a major theme throughout Scripture. It's one of the things we focused on at Summit Semester. However, it's definitely something I still need mull over. It's a pretty abstract concept, at least in my head. However, two things are clear to me. It is both a physical and spiritual Kingdom. The Kingdom is in a state of being already here and not yet fully arrived. Beyond that, I'm still figuring out what it actually looks like in everyday life.

We live in a dark and fallen world, yet our response should be hope. Tom defined hope as a present belief rooted in the past but fulfilled in the future. It is something we cling to now, because we know God is faithful based on redemptive history and personal experience, knowing that He will fulfill His promises. It's a confidence that God is going to do everything He has promised, even when we are surrounded by nothing but darkness.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. - Romans 15:13