Big Break 2011

For those of you coming from my newsletter, here are the results of what we saw God do this year at Big Break.

Throughout the 4 weeks of programs, we had close to 3,000 students involved. These students were able to generate 12,862 spiritual conversations with other students on the beach. Of these conversations, the Gospel was presented 5,084 times.

In total, there were 486 people who indicated that they would like to trust Christ for the forgiveness of their sins and the future of their lives.

It was a great month and awesome to hear all the stories of how students lives were changed on the beach. Let me know if you want to read more stories, I’ll try to send some your way!

You can see more Big Break pictures on my Facebook page and watch a behind the scenes tour here (Beware, we had just worked 110 hours in a week and we’re a bit loopy!).

I appreciate you guys so much!

The Faithful God

I’ve always sort of been a nerd when it comes to finances. I loved math and science in high school. In college I took just about every math class available. I enjoyed accounting classes in my business minor. Budgets are fun for me. I love when I get to run a conference and they let me help plan and keep the budget, from it’s inception to when we close the books. In fact, I just finished wrapped up almost half a million dollars worth of budgets for this past year as our fiscal year closed. Long story short, I love numbers.

And recently even more, I’ve loved when the numbers don’t work out. Now, I know what you accountant-types are thinking…”What?!? The numbers have to ALWAYS work out! Always.”

But when I do my personal budget, I love to see how on paper there’s never enough money from month to month, but God comes through all the time. Since college it’s been like that. The faithful God takes the numbers that don’t work and makes them work. I like that. I like that God is faithful. I like that He hears us when we pray. I like that He calls us to himself, even though it is sometimes uncomfortable for us (sometimes more than uncomfortable, and just down right gut-wrenchingly painful), that He will not settle for being second-best, and that He wants our hearts: all of them.

He’s still working on getting all of mine, and I’m still working at giving all of it to Him. It hurts to let go, but when the numbers don’t work out, every month, it’s a reminder that when I let go and trust Him, he can do unimaginable things with the normal, mundane stuff we are around every day.

Leaving for the summer

In a couple weeks I pack up my life again and move to Fort Collins, Colorado for the summer. It’s tough being on the road and away from home so much, but I do love the part God allows me to play in his story of the world, allowing me to help make conferences possible that train missionaries to go out into all the nations and proclaim the good news. I’m looking forward again to the people i will meet along the way, the stories I will hear, the friendships I will develop, getting to see what God does in the lives of those attending the conference in Fort Collins, and ultimately seeing what He does in the places around the world they will go and serve Him. From being on a college campus in Rome, to cooking over wood fires in Afghanistan, to starting churches and ministries for prostitutes in East Asia, these folks are my heroes and I’m thankful for the opportunity to be able to serve them.

Thanksgiving on the other side of the world…

Over thanksgiving I went to a large country in the far east to visit some very special friends i had made through a conference (XTRACK) I ran last summer. It was quite an interesting experience.

I saw God at work in ways that I could never have really imagined. Students who were receptive to and interested in the gospel in ways that I have never seen. I guess when you live in a country whose mantra for kids during their formative years is ‘There is no God, communism is the right way to live, and the government knows what is best for me’, it’s nice to get a glimpse of hope somewhere.

It was in many ways similar to many of my experiences overseas, but in many ways so very different. And I also learned there is a special calling for people who devote themselves to live there full-time, long-term. I’m not sure if I could do it (well, aside from that same calling). The big cities were just so big with so many people–there’s a reason its the most populated country on earth. There is beauty and dirt, resourcefulness and pollution, poverty and wealth. Many of my friends there love the culture, love the people, love that they get to be a light in a dark place.

It was really fun and encouraging to be able to see the other side of what I do. I have a concept for running operations at a conference, and I get to hear some great stories and meet some great people, but this was my first chance to see what happens after the conference…to go into the front lines where the staff that our conferences train are giving their lives to the cause of Christ, to walk on the campuses where they meet and engage students, to hear disciples reflect on what they were Thankful for, to see underground churches meeting in the back room of a restaurant, and to get a taste of life international.

I have such a great respect for the individuals who devote their lives to living cross-culturally to spread the good news of God’s redemption and reconciliation. They are my heroes, and I find it such a privilege to serve them by organizing and planning the conferences that prepare them to be in an environment that is often quite different from what they’re used to in America.

My thanks and appreciation goes out to them.

To see pictures from the trip, check out my Facebook page

music and tension

The other night, my roommate Kyle and I were up talking about evangelism. He’s been wrestling with how to share his faith without being weird and how to love people that may be going to hell without making them feel like he’s condemning them to hell. The more we talked he kept referring to those dynamics as tension…dealing with the tension of these two things, and I started trying to come up with an analogy for tension that would help him see the benefit and value of those things being in tension with each other.

Cause for all intents and purposes, those two paradoxes must exist. If we’re honest, believing in Christ, or God at all, is a little weird. That’s faith. Belief in the unseen. It might be a little less weird than belief in unicorns, but probably not much. So to admit that you even have faith is a little weird, but doesn’t have to be weird. And If those things aren’t in tension, for example, if you have all weird with no faith (just being weird for the sake of it…which I’ve done some in my day), that’s pretty useless, and all faith with no weird (faith to move mountains but never telling anyone about it)…that’s pretty useless as well.

And we see those types of things all throughout the scriptures, and the paradox of God is one of the things that attracts me most to him. That seeming contradictions could exist in truth and simultaneously is just crazy enough to be reality. We see that it is by grace, through faith, and not of works, that we are saved. But faith without works is dead. And a tension is born. We see God’s Sovereignty and man’s ability to choose evil juxtaposed in tension with each other. We see in scripture that we are not to worry about tomorrow, or to say tomorrow we will do this or that, but Jesus also says it’s foolish not to consider the cost of building a barn. We are to concurrently think about the future and not think about the future.

The more I think about tensions and how they pull at each other to keep each other in balance and in check, the more I think about a guitar, and how it’s strings are useless without tension. If the string is only connected to one end and dangling freely, that string has no purpose. But once that string is strung and a tension applied it begins to produce a tone. The tension serves as a catalyst for music to be made.

I think the Christian life might be viewed as one of tuning a guitar. We have all these tensions, and we wrestle with them all, struggling to find the way to produce sounds, let alone notes, and there are so many strings to figure out how they all work well together, and in so doing, we learn how to live, how to continually refine how those tensions play out in our everyday lives, and how they interact together to sound beautiful. We may have different tunings and we may be slightly out of tune at times, but in the end we are finally simultaneously more fully human and more fully divine, an instrument of God’s grace, and He teaches us how to make Music.

entering the story

While working XTRACK this summer, I took an opportunity to participate with all the attendees in a day of creative spiritual exercises. I say that, because for me, they were creative and things that I would not normally do. However, these disciplines came from many different sources and from Christians throughout the ages and around the world.

One exercise that I did and subsequently shared with the group was that of entering into Scripture. Reading a passage and seeing what character you most connect with, putting yourself in their shoes, and just seeing what happens. Our passage for the day was from the gospels, the story of the Crucifixion. For me, this is what happened. Several of the participants requested that I post this somewhere, so here it is.

In the story of the crucifixion I often feel like Simon—forced to carry the cross of Jesus. It feels sort of like a burden I am forced to bear, and though compelled in part by His face, here predominantly because someone else said, “Here, you carry this.”

What would Jesus say to me now? As I am coerced into doing what he is physically unable to…what does this broken, bruised, tattered, tired man say to me? What is that look in His eyes? Is it gratitude? Thanks? Does he even have the strength to say anything at all? Can he communicate with anything more than his eyes right now? What do they say?

“You are a good man. You keep following me—when you don’t want to—when you feel like you can’t—take up my cross and follow me. It’s not easy. It may not even be good. But it’s right. You are right to follow me. You are a good man.”

His eyes are compassionate, they are grateful, they are full of peace. They pierce through to the very bone and marrow, opening my life and exposing it for the fraud and sham of a life it is. His eyes gently say, “I will give you life.” What a thought. The man on his last legs. The man without a life, offering life. How is this possible? What sort of life does He even have to offer? Why do I even continue on carrying this cross? Surely not ‘cause I was asked to…I’m not that afraid of the Roman guard. There’s something about his marred body—no—there’s something in his eyes that beckons…

“Come with me. Come and die with me.”