Boston

I can’t handle this guilt.It’s been almost two months since I’ve posted anything and my only excuse is laziness and proscrastination. Forgive me friends. I’m writing to you from Boston where I’m just hanging out and sharing about the work in London with folks. As a big history buff, Boston is my kind of place. I probably won’t have time to check out all the historical sites but yesterday I did walk about 10 feet of the Freedom Trail on my way to get a hot dog.  A true American experience.

Tomorrow I’ll be boarding a bus to NYC with about 9 girls. Don’t ask me how this happened. The support raising trail usually doesn’t have such perks. But it will be my first time in the Big Apple and I’m very excited. Supposedly there’s wi-fi on the bus so I plan to do some bus blogging. Until then, goodnight!

 

My Top Ten Albums of 2008

10.  The Sucker Punch Show- Lovedrug

9.  Talking Through Tin Cans- The Morning Benders

8.  Pretty. Odd. -Panic at the Disco

7.  Konk- The Kooks

6.  The Midnight Organ Fight- Frightened Rabbit

5.  The Blind Leaving the Blind- Punch Brothers

4.  Canopy Clow- Anathallo

3.  For Emma, Forever Ago- Bon Iver

2.  Three Flights from Alto Dido- Greg Laswell

1.  Vampire Weekend

 

Reality Check

“…As we look not to the things that seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”-2 Corinthians 4:16-18

That verse is always spiritual reality check for me. Whenever I read it, I am convicted by how much I look to things in the “seen” category for life and meaning.  As humans, we like things we can see. They seem more real, more trustworthy, and more enduring. But that verse goes against all our humanly preferences and tells us that what is most real is what we cannot see. What is most lasting and trustworthy are things unseen, for as Paul  says elsewhere in Colossians 3, our life is hidden with Christ in God. Unseen and hidden, yet revealed through the open eyes of faith.

So this Christmas let us pray for the Spirit to opens those eyes and gives us all a reality check to see Jesus, our eternal unseen hidden hope.

 

London Articles and Maps

I came across some cool articles and maps about London’s unparalleled ethnic diversity. Check them out here.  And also check out an interesting article about London from the SBC mission’s magazine.

 

A thought.

I find it ironic that the darkness of the world often shines the brightest lights.

 

Fried Turkeys and Idol Assassins

I hope you all wonderful Thanksgiving weekends! I spent most of the week down in Nashville, TN where a lot of my mother’s family lives. Two words sum up my Thanksgiving pretty well: Fried Turkey. It’s the turkey of the future. Enough said.

Well December marks my one year support raising anniversary and I’m celebrating by giving myself a good hot cup of House Blend. You can join the celebration by praying that I raise all my support soon so that a two year anniversary never comes. It might be your only chance to pray for an anniversary not to come, so take advantage of it. The past year has been an exercise in how to kill and be killed. Through support raising, Jesus is slowly teaching me how to kill my sanity-destroying idols and how to be killed by his life-restoring grace. I like to think of myself as an idol-assassin. I’m not quite the idol-assassin I want to be but support raising is probably the best training you can get. And while I’m talking about killing, if you’re looking for some new tunes to spruce up your holiday season, I highly recommend The Killers new album “Day and Age.” This album just might turn me into a dancer.

I need you all to be praying for some support parties I have coming up. Support parties are an opportunity for me to share what God is up to in myself and in London with friends of pre-existing supporters. I really need your prayers because my speaking abilities are bad enough in one-on-one conversations. You can imagine what they are in front of a group of people. In case you didn’t know, I’m addicted to easy, and speaking in front of people isn’t easy for me. So naturally I fret and fear over these sharing times. What I need from you is your prayers that Jesus would give me unJeff-like boldness and confidence, not in myself or my abilities, but in the promises of the God of Moses who uses slow, bumbling speaker like myself to glorify himself and accomplish his purposes. I’ll be contacting all of you a little closer to these parties to recruit even more prayer for these parties. That’s how bad I need it.

As always, thanks for reading my pleas for prayer and going to God on my behalf. I am living proof that He hears you. I pray that the fires of Jesus’ love would engulf your hearts this advent season as we ponder the wondrous reality of the incarnation. Come, let us adore him.

 

Wisdom for Procrastinators

A great encouragement for procrastinators like me found at Justin Taylor’s blog.

No unwelcome tasks become any the less unwelcome by putting them off till tomorrow.
It is only when they are behind us and done,
that we begin to find that there is a sweetness to be tasted afterwards,
and that the remembrance of unwelcome duties unhesitatingly done is welcome and pleasant.

Accomplished, they are full of blessing,
and there is a smile on their faces as they leave us.
Undone, they stand threatening and disturbing our tranquility,
and hindering our communion with God.

If there be lying before you any bit of work from which you shrink,
go straight up to it, and do it at once.
The only way to get rid of it is to do it.

-Alexander MacLaren (1826–1910), Scottish preacher

 

Death Wears a Mask

If you have not read Paul David Tripp’s Quest for More, you need to cancel all future purchases and get this book now. I reread one of its most insightful paragraphs tonight and felt the urge to share it with all of you.

The call of Christ does seem hard. “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” But this hard call is actually the call of grace. It is actually a means of rescue. In calling you to your death, Christ is actually protecting you from death. Your Lord knows that you have suicidal tendencies, so he will not leave you to yourself. He knows that you will tend to look at life and see death and look at death and see life. He knows that you would hold with clenched fists to what is not yours and refuse to open your hands to what is a gift. What could be more horrible than to get everything I want and miss the one thing I was made for? His death call is really an offer to a life beyond our wildest dreams-a life of joy, satisfaction, purpose, and pleasure that this sadly broken world could never deliver in its finest moment. Shrinking your life to size of your life is not life. It is death wearing the mask of life.

 

The Good Life

There are some days when I’m ready to throw in the towel with support raising. On those days I start thinking about all the easier things I could be doing with my life, things much closer to my tiny comfort zone. I start coveting jobs without a hint of fund raising involved. I tell myself that’s the good life, the comfortable life. If only I could have a job like that, I would be happy.

I think I would be happy because I wouldn’t be so dependent on Jesus. I wouldn’t need him so much just to survive another day. I could be more dependent on my own wisdom and not need to mess around with this communing with Jesus business. There wouldn’t be a need to break so many of my cherished idols and I would look a lot stronger, a lot wiser, and a lot more successful than how support raising makes me appear.

But thankfully, Jesus often vetoes my version of the good life and calls me out of my shallow self-dependence into the deep waters of trusting him. I’ll admit, like a cat in a bathtub, I go kicking and screaming into those waters. It’s not easy and its not comfortable, but Jesus knows exactly what he’s doing.

 

Sunday Cigars

Since I missed last Sunday, I’ve got two Winston Churchill quotes for you this Sunday. I think some Churchill quotes are very appropriate for a week in which Americans displayed the wonder of a democracy. We Americans often take this strange thing called democracy for granted because we’ve never been under anything else (although some argue the last 8 years have been a tyranny).

But Churchill wasn’t this naive. He championed the cause of democracy because he saw the dangers of anything else. He saw what our would would be without freedom, without liberty, and without equality. And thus he fought. With weapons of both war and words, Churchill took his stand and defended a world where presidential elections are even possible. We owe a debt of gratitude to this great little British man.

Speaking of Democracy…

“With all their weakness and with all their strength, with all their faults, with all their virtues, with all the criticisms that may be made against them, with their many shortcomings, with lack of foresight, lack of continuity of purpose or pressure only of superficial purpose, they [democracies] nevertheless assert the right of the common people-the broad masses of people-to take a concious and effective share in the government of their country”

On Cincinnati…

“Cincinnati, I thought, was the most beautiful of the inland cities of the Union. From the tower of its unsurpassed hotel the city spreads far and wide its pageant of crimson, purple, and gold, laced by silver streams that are great rivers.”