Nobody Warned Me About This

Dallas, TX :::December 8,2005

Usually when you start a job or at least when you're interviewing, they will tell you about potential perks and pitfalls of taking the job. You know, things like when you work at Subway you get all the veggies and pop you want. The downside is probably what veggies and pop in huge quantities do to your digestive system.

Yesterday I stumbled into one of these for me. I spent the entire afternoon--4.5 hours riding around the city of Dallas with a man I've known from a distance, at times admired and always respected. He grew up in the city, grew up poor and now teaches and lives urban ministry. I don't know if it is my own childhood, my own love for the city or what but the day captured me. And in the meantime I fell in love with a people I don't yet know.

I don't remember how it actually happened. Much in the same way you start out reading a book only to look up and realize you've been reading for hours and your heart and mind are captured, filled, overwhelmed and you want to simply soak in that moment..much in that way it happened. Suddenly lunch and business had become 290 minutes of stories, sermons, lessons, people, visions and realities blurring into me basically collapsing in a chair at the airport trying to make sense of what I was feeling..thinking..dreaming.

The story isn't all that remarkable, its definately a "you had to be there" thing and yet as I told him as we parted ways I want others to be "there". In fact I'm going to make that happen. I wish you, if you give any sort of a rip about the gospel could have this experience. To see what I saw, to hear what I heard and then to just see what God does in your heart.

I've lost my heart a few times. I lost it after I started Bible College and it took some letters to bring me back. I lost it somewhere during the journey that was Colorado. It took Cincinnati and Washington DC to bring it back. I'd questioned it in the past few weeks and it took Dallas to fill it with something that can't be taken away. In the coming days I'll try and put some of it down on a screen. I'm sure it won't do it justice but it needs to be released somehow.

In the meantime, may God blow you away. May you know that what you're doing is exactly why you're here. May you not feel as though you are passing time or surviving a moment or may you at least for the moment soar above the storm on something much bigger than you and be filled with new energy and life. Blessings.