I love to tell the story

This morning the temperature was just a tad cooler, and I managed to walk Scout without arriving home drenched in perspiration. My devotional passage was Hebrews 13:7 -"remember those who spoke the word of God to you... check out their lives.... imitate their faith". That's when I saw the sun rise over a church.

I love this picture because of what it says to me. The silhouette, the emerging light, even the telephone wires - standing sentinel to a communication mode fast falling into disuse.

This is "the communication age". And so much of life has become tied up in how we get our message across. Of course, there first has to be a message, and I'm suspicious that too many of us in the "Christian" world reveal a lack of confidence in the message. As if we fail to engage any creativity when it comes to communication because we're worried that we have nothing to share.

We're like that leaning telephone pole - or worse. It's like we're sitting by our oversized rotary phone (fixed securely to one place on the wall), at the end of a barely used and poorly maintained wire, waiting for it to ring and wondering why the world sees us as increasingly irrelevant.

Breakfast:

After coffee with Rebekah I met my friend Gerard for breakfast. We talked about faith, how the Bible has spoken to us during the past week, what God is up to in our lives. We prayed together before we left. What a great way to begin the day!

People often wonder about how it's possible to live as people of faith, to "pray continually", or to live as if Jesus is involved in every detail... Well it sure helps to start with a devotional time at 6:30 AM, before anything else happens, and to talk with a friend over breakfast, and to pray together before we even begin work.

There's a phrase I used in one of the Upper Room video segments - "Jesus wants a seat at the table of our consciousness."

How is our message going to be irrelevant:

• if we carry it to breakfast...
• if we use Jesus as a filter through which we pour the content of every day...
• if we take it with us...
• if we move away from relegating the reach of the Gospel to incoming calls on a rotary dial phone at the end of a decaying wire...?

We can't say that the church is irrelevant without saying that we are irrelevant - because we are the church, and it's our opportunity to either pick up or ignore.

It's all about communication. It's about the story we tell. It's about actually living in the truth of what we believe - or in the consequence of what we don't....

If you were a story - and you are - would the story be fiction? Or a tragedy? Maybe a comedy? A sit-com? A melodrama? Or is your story another Gospel... the good news of God's saving Grace?

- DEREK