a drop of water

Part 4 of 5 in Tips for Budgeting

Involving Community – You are not alone

1. Accountability - Budgeting sucks when you have no more money in your restaurant envelope and everyone else is going out to eat.  Budgeting can feel lonely and overwhelming, so involve your community.  When we share about our financial decisions and are open about where we are investing (spending) our money and include others in the decisioning process, it becomes a lifestyle for a group of people instead of just a loan dingy on a stormy sea.  This helps expand our perspectives and exposes us to others research, questions and buying tips.

2. Sharing – We seem to have a collection of household items that get used once and then sit on the shelf for the rest of their lives till they are donated or given away.  Consider buying these type of items with the purpose of sharing their cost and their use among your friends and family.  When did restaurants become all about quantity instead of quality?  Jenn and I like to eat out on our date nights, but it can easily get expensive.  We’ve been trying to share dishes instead because often times one dish is enough for both of us.  When we do order two, we tend to regret the stuffed feeling in our stomachs as we exit.

3. Be relational – Ultimately, the things we buy really don’t provide us with lasting satisfaction.  It is more about how those things we buy bring us into relationship with others.  Relationships, memories, friendships, and the like are what is lasting, beyond the latest and greatest, shiniest and fastest electronic device, shoe, bag, car, and tv.  Books have a great power here.  I find myself often buying books to own them, read them once and then display them on a bookshelf as proof of my worth, but this renders books to mere dust collectors. If we buy a book, read it, then give it away it opens up opportunity for dialog and discussion between people.

A Community that Loves God – A Message from Mark 12:28-31
Sermon by Jamie Wilson @ Coast Vineyard on October 5th, 2008

Jamie’s sermon was focused on Mark 12:30, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and challenged us to assess our spiritual condition against this passage.  The four questions he posed were:

1. What do I want the most in life?
2. Are there emotions that I hide from God?
3. Are my thoughts obedient to Christ?
4. Do I ever get exhausted serving God?

He explained the aim of each of these questions alongside the four aspects of loving God with your heart, soul, mind and strength.  What we love with our heart is what we want most in life; it is what drives us and what we hope for.  For me I know I hope for success.  Wresting with identifying and expressing our emotions to God is very much apart of loving God with all of our soul.  For me I know I hide my impatience and frustration from God.  Cleaning up our intentions and trying not to focus solely on how “we” performed in life is important in loving God with all our mind.  For me critiquing how well I do takes center stage too often.  The last connection was that we must be pouring and spending all our strength (our life) to pursue God.  This is not an argument for burnout, but an encouragement to love God with all of your strength.  For me, I err towards the side of burnout a little too easily. Jamie closed up the message with Matthew 13:44 in an encouragement to recover our passion for God by discovering our need for God, surrendering before God, and committing to God.

Joe’s recent post over at globalyawning, challenges us to use our testimonies to engage the world around us.  Our testimonies are a manifestation of that “vision of life in the kingdom of the heavens in the fellowship of Jesus” that Dallas Willard suggests is essential as we lead people to become disciples of Jesus.

Our testimonies are living.  The initial point of acknowledging Jesus as Lord of our life is just that, the beginning of our testimony, our daily learning from, walking with, and trusting of God.  The association that testimonies are limited to our initial conversion restricts us from the depth of gratefulness for that initial point that is gained in the perspective of a life giving and active relationship with God.  The more our lives our transformed into being more like Christ, the more we understand where we came from in sin without Christ.

There is often a temptation to fluff up our testimonies about God with our own ideas of what we think will least offensive or more inline with current trends and thoughts.  But there is no need for fluff.  A living testimony requires no fluff of ours because it describes the truth and reality of God’s work in us for the undeserved, grace filled expression of love that it is. This work is supernatural.  Our fluff does not do it justice.

The work in us is great primarily because of the worker, God.  The greatness of the work itself is only secondary.  Because of the magnitude and creativity of God’s power and work, each persons testimony will give a glimpse of the reality that is an omniscient, omnipresent, incomprehensible God. It is in the little bits and pieces, the glimpses of the larger reality that we experience God individually and then pass it on to inspire those whose hearts are ready in the form of our testimony.

I believe that God’s work in us, his over all design is inherently communal.  I mean to say that when we are ready to allow God’s work in us, our testimonies, our relationship with God to engage the relationships that we have with our friends and family, we will find that God’s work in us mirrors and sometimes precedes his work in the very same friends and family.  This is how we can act as the hands and feet of God.

Sermon @ Coast Vineyard by Jamie Wilson on September 28th, 2008

Building a Community of Love (a message from Acts 2:42-47)

A Dream for Our Church…We aim to build a community of love…

• A community that loves God. (Passionately)
• A community that loves each other. (Most effective method of communication and apologetics)
• A community that loves the world. (With the same sacrificial love that God loved us first with)

The Building Blocks for a Community of Love…We are suppose to be a sign to the present and coming Kingdom of God

• A commitment to the Bible. (God’s word.  Often times we don’t know when to say what, or what even to say.)
• A commitment to sharing life together. (Christ’s disciples were known by their love for each other, committed to the relationships and the pain and joys of lif are the things that matter.)
• A commitment to worship. (“We become what we worship.” -NT Wright.  The body of Jesus, broken for us is our unity.)
• A commitment to prayer. (Intentionality, sticking with it, and pressing into situations with prayer is where we catch glimpses God’s heart.)
• The power of the Holy Spirit. (Tension and messiness are a given when the Holy Spirit starts acting).
• The practice of generosity. (open and generous, our God is fundamentally giving).
• A community that is really love will grow as the result of new faith.  (If the first six are present, it will be hard for keep this seventh aspect from being evident.  Likewise, if any of the first six are absent, the seventh will likely be impossible.

This was a good reminder to me about the importance of love in our everyday lives.  Each of the commitments that are building blocks for a community of love are an expression of love.  A commitment to the Bible is a love for God’s word to influence and transform our minds and hearts.  A commitment to sharing life together is a love for the social structure that God has designed for us.  A commitment to worship is a love for God in who he is to us, the world, and what he has done for us and the world.  A commitment to prayer is a love for our relationship of dependence on God and his provision for us.  A commitment to the power of the Holy Spirit is a love to see God supernaturally guide and counsel us.  A commitment to generosity is a love for the people around us who God has created and their physical, emotional and spiritual well being.  And lastly, a commitment to a growing community of faith is a love for God’s creation in light of his plan to save it from sin.

Yesterday our mudrun team drove out to Cowles Mountain for practice.  The course was a little over two miles to the summit with an elevation delta of a little over one thousand feet.  From the trail head, we could see what we believed to be the summit and started running in that direction with at a slight incline.  But shortly after, the grade increased, the trail became more rocky and dusty, and head high foliage blocked our views of the summit.  Every now and then we would get a glimpse of the summit, but then turn off in the other direction in a set of dusty switch-backs.  The trail routed us up a nearby moutain (hill) and then across a ridge-like stretch where we could see the true peak of Cowles Mountain, slightly higher than the peak we saw from the trail head.  We also got to see increased grade of the final stretch for our run.  The head high brush no longer blocked our view and the sun became a lot more harsh.  When we reached the summit, it was a good feeling.  There were other hikers and bikers there, enjoying the breeze and the view.  We tried to see where we had come from and we tried to recognize places in San Diego that were familiar to us.

Often I feel runs like this illustrate aspects of my life and walk/run with God.  I feel like the task before me is like a mountain.  At the trail head I’m full of expectation and optimism of the journey ahead.  But a little ways into the journey, I get discouraged at not being able to see the goal anymore.  The rocks and dust temper my determination.  The head-high bush distractions of life get in the way of my view of the goal.  I have to focus on the trail, and just put one step infront of the other.  The trail always gets steeper, despite my hoping that maybe it will get easier.  Though, now and then, if I’m aware enough to look for them, there are glimpses of the goal ahead.

As I get closer to the goal, the distractions of life get put in the right perspective, but there is more heat beating down on me.  When we near the actual summit, we realize that what we thought was the peak really wasn’t the peak at all, and that God had something different (better) in mind.  When we do reach the top, there will be others waiting for us there, who have run the trail before.  We look back on how God has provided for us in the past and where we have come from.  And then, we run back down the mountain only to go and find the next higher, harder one to attempt, having gained the perspective, the learnings, the failures and the successes of that completed mountain.  Lastly, the run would have been much more difficult if it were not for my teammates.  We are in this race together, and we will finish together.