Snapshot

Just spent a weekend up in the Santa Cruz Mountains with the church at our annual summer retreat. As always, good time of rest and fellowship... didn't have as much time for reflection as I would have liked, but I can always find time to do that here. Spent most of my time with the youth, where we invited Hideyo to come and teach from the Word on who, when, and where to worship - basically encouraging the youth to seek after God in all things, since many of them have grown up in the church and sometimes seem to fall into the perception that the experience of God is limited to within its walls.

The yearly basketball game between the (now college-age) guys vs. the older guys was intense as ever - first to 12 by ones, win by 2, ended up with a final score of 19-18 - after a while no one could make two consecutive shots. I didn't play all that well on offense, since I almost never get to play with two highly effective post men - I'm used to playing with one, feeding the post and then either cutting to the hoop or spotting up for a jumper, but with two around the hoop, I couldn't quite get into a rhythm of movement and ended up standing around most of the time. At least I had plenty of energy to expend on defense.

There was also a definite spiritual focus on expanding our mindsets to attempt to grasp images and scenes of the work God is doing around the world, ranging from the indigenous church in Mongolia that grew from church plant to a highly effective missionary sender, to the Mozambique multi-ministry reaching out to orphans, landfill people, and a whole host of other people. It's always refreshing to see images and hear stories of brothers and sisters around the world worshipping God in ways that we can only begin to appreciate.

Philosophical question I've been pondering lately - is it better to live with a failed attempt or the what-if from never following through on that attempt? I'd like to believe in the former but I think my life's pattern has generally been the latter.