new day

Hey everybody! I am writing this a few days after Easter. My body and mind are tired but my spirit is alive and well! I am so excited about the things that are happening at The Journey and I feel truly privileged to be a part of the creative process as we dream of the future together. What will the future of The Journey look like? How about the future of the Church in general? When I think of these things, I see interconnected lives. I see housewives and accountants and custodians and teachers and physicians and artists all connecting and sharing and loving and living together. At The Journey, we are trying to be intentional about building our church on relationships. There is a real beauty in true community. Most of us at The Journey come from traditional church backgrounds or no church background at all so we don't have a good idea of what true community looks like. But we realize that God has called us to something more than what church "looks" like in America today. We have a desire in our collective gut to be something more than we are. We really want to affect change: in our schools, in politics, in our communities and in the world at large. But we've realized that the first step towards change is to reach out and connect. We truly want to be a church with the wider community at its heart. And so as we try to become this different kind of church that really invests in people's lives, we realize that things will get messy. Relationships are messy. People can be offensive. But we believe that this is what God is calling us to. We love people because God loves people. We will continue to reach out and love and accept and challenge all who come across our paths. We are a community of people who are trying their best to live out the way of Jesus. Things are happening as a result of this. A movement is beginning to grow. It is a new day.

Slacker

The End of an Era - Brett Favre

Here's how you know you're getting old: When you begin losing your hair, when your body creaks as you get out of bed, when your kids are embarrassed by you and when the athletes you looked up to for so long leave the games that they loved. Today Brett Favre retired. Today I feel old. Brett's rookie year was my junior year in college. I've always loved his passion for the game and his free-spirited nature. He was a cowboy. A gunslinger. He made the game fun for everyone who played with him and for everyone who watched him play. Now, those games are memories that will go straight to the Hall of Fame. But I think we can learn something about life from the way Brett played football. There was something about his free-spiritedness that was downright contagious. I mean, people wanted to be Brett Favre. This was a guy who left it all on the playing field. And as I creep up in age; as my daughter becomes old enough to be embarrassed by me and as my body continues to get creakier and creakier, I think I want to live life like Brett played. I want to live with zest, I want to live with passion, I want to love what I do, I want to do the best job I possibly can and I want to have fun!! In playing the way he did, Brett made his share of mistakes (during the 2005 and 2006 seasons, he threw a ton of interceptions) but he never would have become the player he was without taking those chances and having no regrets. I'm pretty sure that's the kind of life that God intended each one of us to live. So, let's do it! We'll fumble around, we'll make mistakes, but there's nothing like the feeling of walking away from something knowing that you've given your all. So, thanks Brett. Thanks for a great career. Thanks for helping us see life a little bit more clearly through the game that you loved so much. Thanks for the memories.

Peace,
Dan