It’s ironic that I go to a dry place to refresh my soul. Last week I did my monthly desert get away solitude get my head & heart on straight time.

This time was a little different than the last two. I felt the freedom to journal & to even do a little reading.
• I finished Bo’s Café a powerful book that my friend John Lynch wrote (John has agreed to come & speak at Journey in December – get stoked NOW). Click here for info on Bo’s.
• I began reading Counterfeit Gods by Tim Keller.
• I had a great run, but forgot my visor thing so I felt like Lawrence of Arabia by the end with the sun beating down on my face.
• The birds were starving apparently – I kept feeding them & they kept coming and grubbing. So cool!

Maybe it was the ideas from Bo’s Café, maybe it was that I’ve been trafficking in Ezekiel in my own time with God, maybe it’s the message on “Real Worship for the Real God” but I felt like God was saying: boy, we’re going to get real here”. I’m like, oooookkkkk???
I woke up on Tuesday with a line from an old Rod Stewart (Faces) song in my head.
“I firmly believed that I, didn’t need anyone but me.
I sincerely thought I was so complete… look how wrong you can be.” (from Every Picture Tells A Story – a great song)
Now remember, I’m basically silent for these days. It’s not like I’m bumping classic rock tunes & of course they get in your head. I mean, I woke up with this as the very 1st thing in my dome. Hmmmm.

Here’s a bit of vulnerability (stop reading if you like perfect pastor types)
I wrote this after some time in the scriptures.
You are safe. You know everything about me, all the ugly, repulsive ^%$$. This, Your presence is a place where I can, must be real. But even here I find myself afraid to lose control. I find myself trying to mange this because I’m afraid of what You might tell me to do. I haven’t had this feeling for a while. But I have it!

After looking at the 50 or so birds feeding a few feet from me, I wrote this:
One dove has to take a chance & fly into the feeder. Next thing you know, they are all there – it’s packed. Is the seed on the ground the next level of risk for them?

It seems like every one of these little adventures has it’s own script, and I’m not the guy who gets to write it.

The best way I can describe this one was like a 1st aid pro cleaning out a scrape type wound. You think they are going to just kind of lightly wife off the blood, but they have to scrub a little to make sure they get out all the foreign objects to avoid infection.

I wrote this shortly before I packed up & headed for home:
Seems like I had to face a lot of ugly stuff and re-experience forgiveness. Help me to truly turn from whatever & to YOU!

Funny thing about His hand on you: even the wounds feel like love.

Thank you sir, may I have another. Looking forward to next month!

For me this weekend’s message felt like a bit of departure from the flow of the series on WORSHIP, From Consumer to Consumed. But as I look back and reflect, it’s impossible to do justice to the message of the Bible without talking about “Idols”. It seems obvious that there is more said in the Bible about the object of worship, than there is about defining it or talking about “how” (esp. true of you factor out stuff about the tabernacle construction in Exodus and the sacrificial cultus in Leviticus).

One of my working assumptions when reading the Bible is that we share a common humanity with people throughout the history of the scriptures, that their temptations, the core of them, are the same as mine. So it’s fair to say that there isn’t so many warnings, admonitions, commands, rebukes and arguments against idolatry because we don’t have a problem, but because we do.

The challenge of the message for me was to be specific enough that people could apply the idols in the heart idea of Ezekiel 14, but not so specific that we fell into some kind of list spirituality or legalism. We can relate to ANYTHING IDOLATROUSLY!

Linda, overheard one guy at church say to his wife as he handed her the baby, “you hold idol number 2 while I go over to promise land and pick up idol number 1. Too funny! I think he got it.

PRAYER FOR THE PERSECUTED CHURCH: We had a powerful video story from people actually living & working in repressive nations. Wow! It concludes with the brother, whose life is on the line asking, “Who can have victory over God?” No one! Jonathan Cervantes, who leads our prayer ministry for the persecuted church called, Bound With Them, led us in prayer.

ANSWERED PRAYER. I was praying on Saturday that my friend, colleague & boss, Mike Burns would be well enough to be able to come to one of the services on Sunday. It was awesome to see him there. God is getting him through. Keep praying.

BEING NEAR THE DYING IS GOOD FOR ME. Someone asked me to come & pray for her mother who was dying after the service. Greg & April King, good friends who serve on our prayer team agreed to go with me. Mary Lou is 88 and has stage 4 melanoma. She’s in and out of consciousness and coherence. But she still has a wit and humor that I can tell must have made her entertaining to be with just a short while. She loved us praying for her. She loved the passage in John 14 about Jesus preparing a place for us, the place we were created to be in. Honestly, I always wonder if I said the right thing in these situations. Did I make sure she really understood grace? I didn’t really know her till yesterday. Should I have tried to explain more about faith in Jesus? I’m glad I was there. It is good for us to number our days.

OC, MOM & HUGE BURRITOS. On Saturday I drove up to see my mom. We went to her favorite place to eat lunch & she ordered a burrito the size of a nerf football! It was good to see her and maybe the greatest work of God I saw over the weekend was the 5 with no real traffic there and back.

GOODBYE TO AN OLD FRIEND. On Monday, instead of surfing, I had to go through all the rigmarole of turning in my old gross-polluting truck to Arnold. I bought it in Fresno from a friend Leo. It drove & drove. David got it when he was about 17. That was the end! It lasted a couple more years, couldn’t pass smog, needed front-end work, yada yada. Odd how the things associated with memories take on some of the emotional value of those experiences.

Still thinking about my previously promised post on last week’s desert retreat.

It was a beautiful evening (as in late afternoon) tonight – 70 & wispy clouds.

The middle & the heart of the series on worship was this past weekend’s message. Every series that we do at Journey usually has a controlling idea a what’s this thing about. When I’m laying out the series for the team that works on this stuff, I write a one-paragraph thing that in my mind is like a press release. It’s kind of a “so what is this & why should I care” description. It’s a good discipline for me & it usually ends up in our weekend guide thing. This series originally had some other titles, but we picked this message title & changed the whole series to “From Consumer to Consumed”.

I think the heart idea so far in the series is summed up in those 2 changes, those 2 “from…to” statements.
From God as means to God as end.
From seeking happiness by pleasing ME, to seeking happiness in sacrificing ME.

Sarah Merk, our college ministries director, did an awesome job setting up the message and the one last look at our amazing “Consumer to Consumed” video.

I’m praying for a noticeable difference in the worship temp as we gather. I feel like the Holy Spirit is landing on our worship in cool way. May it spread out all over the room!

Visitor eyes. I was stoked that someone who works at one of the Starbucks that I hang out at showed up on Friday. We’ve had a number of cool spiritual talks. She often uses her breaks to pull up a chair & ask a few good questions. She’s a UCSD student & I love how our college students (esp. Bethany ☺) made sure she was welcomed. It’s so great to have guests that you bring at church with you. It gives you those “outsider eyes”. Honestly, it makes me a little self-conscious speaking up there. But I’m grateful & prayerful about what God is doing in her life.

Trick or Treat in my hood: I think I live in one of the best trick or treat neighborhoods around. We had hundreds of kids come through. Linda & I eventually just took chairs out to the driveway – no sense trying to chill in the house. It’s great to meet people & see the kids having fun. For you long-time journey-ites, like you, I miss the Family Fall Festival. But I always felt weird being not home the one night of the year when the whole neighborhood is out interacting.

Here’s a value of Halloween that I never thought of till this year: making you feel old. Half the costumes were lost on me. I’d say, are you a “Power Ranger” thinking I was being all “in their world and stuff.” Of course they weren’t. No one is a power ranger. They don’t know what that is. My kids of course don’t do little kid stuff, so I haven’t a clue what movie character costumes are being marketed. Ouch!

I was in the desert the 1st of this week. So look for another post tomorrow on some desert reflections.

Well it happened again, and I’ve been thinking about blogging about it for 3 weeks so here goes!
It’s about the best hour of my week… so far.

Here’s what you got to get out of your head to make some sense of this: “dude is Joe Pastor so of course this is what he’s going to say.” I get it. I’m thinking it myself. But walk with me a little ways. Another disclaimer, if you like Pastor’s neat & perfect, please stop reading right now. Seriously, this isn’t going to work for you.

O.k. so here it is: The best hour of my week, so far, is my hour on our 24/7 Prayer Wall.

“I knew it!”
Would you give me a second here! Geeezzz!

Today (Wednesday, October 28, 2009) I feel like I am waking up behind. You know that feeling where you already know you can’t get done the stuff you really do need to get done in a given day. I caught myself walking out of my house at 6:40something mumbling, ‘Today’s going to blow!’ Sorry, that’s the truth. Of course, I rebuked myself right there. But that gives you my mindset.

So, I’m asking, begging God to not let this hour, my hour on the wall, be an annoying obstacle to all the things I actually need and to be honest WANT to do. My iCal alarm goes off at 9:45 signaling I’ve got 15 minutes.

So I get my prayer guide out. I’ve decided to submit myself for this hour to the Hour that Changes the World prayer guide that everyone else is using. I don’t want to play “expert” and freelance my way through.

We start the hour with worship. I dial up the Anthem CD that I’ve been loving lately. Ka-Pow! God comes and literally overwhelms me. No lie, I’m grabbing for the Kleenex box, only a little bit out of shame for my earlier attitude. Mostly, I’m overwhelmed with His goodness, His unspeakable grace, His infinite mercy, His utmost patience, the beauty of the Life with God.
The next 59 minutes FLEW by.

There are a few hours left on the 24/7 Prayer Wall that aren’t yet covered. Why don’t you take one! I know you don’t have to sign up for anything to pray. But there is something cool about the accountability of knowing I can’t let go of MY end! There is something momentum building about knowing that someone finished praying right before you & someone is picking it up the very next minute.

To get yourself signed up, send an email to 24-7@journeycom.org

I’m still way behind, but I’m good with that. This day is going to ROCK!

Last Saturday, I met with about 300 of my closest friends for the LIFE WALK, a very fun fundraiser for Life Perspectives (click here). Thanks mostly to people at Journey, I raised a little less than 5k and overall Journey people raised somewhere around 13-14k.

There were people from a bunch of different churches, most of them Catholic. I’m thankful that they were speaking up about the value of life before churches like ours were even aware of the issues. I’m glad to join them in the battle.

Here’s me & Father Pat of Corpus Cristi. I was hoping to be the top fund raising pastor type, but FP edged me out. I was also beaten soundly by the nice lady pictured here.

Here are a few highlights:
• WORKING TOGETHER FOR JUSTICE is a very cool pic of the Kingdom of God. I met a couple of different priests through the Life Walk and have become friends with Bishop Cordileone (now the Bishop of Oakland). He flew down just for the Life Walk. He is one of the most articulate spokesmen for God’s vision for the sanctity of life that I have ever heard. click here for the Wikipedia article on him.

• TOP OF THE CLIFF MINISTRY is cool. Life Perspective is a ministry about changing the way our culture thinks. There are other ministries that are working on legislation, but LP is unique in that it is changing the conversation. I think this is a breakthrough. It’s clear that politically, we are at a stalemate on the abortion issue (I do think there is some positive movement here, but that’s for another post). LP is saying, let’s get in a dialogue and talk about this in terms of feminism. Let’s see if we can get a bigger vision for our lives in general. They have written a curriculum that helps kids get this big picture called Whole Life Curriculum (click here). Michaalene Fredenburg has written a whole different book & launched a campaign called Abortion Changes You (click here). These are all different ways to be life affirming, many of which people who are politically “pro-choice” can affirm.
• JOURNEY IS ALL OVER THIS – I loved seeing so many people from Journey setting up, tearing down, registering, walking serving lunch. It’s a critical part of the prophetic word to “let justice roll down like water” for us to be involved.

• LOVE, NOT ANGER – The vibe at the Life Walk was & always is love. It’s important to note that although everyone there acknowledges that we have a problem as a culture, that we are not a “life-affirming” culture and the consequences for us as a people are grave, the emphasis is on love. The message is about God’s vision for us. The feel is one of hope.

I am glad I was a part of it. I’m glad we (Journey) were a part of it. Next year, I hope you will dive in. In the mean time, check out some of the links & resources. You don’t have to wait for the walk to support LP.

This was weekend #2 of in our worship series called “FROM CONSUMER TO CONSUMED”! This is one of those series in which there is a fairly direct result that we are aiming at, which is to raise the worship temp at Journey. What I’m not sure of is what exactly that will look like. This was also LIFE WALK weekend, which was a pretty big deal. It’s not a stretch to see how the message of the weekend and the LIFE WALK is connected.

Here are a few highlights from the weekend:
3 REALLY DIFFERENT “WORSHIP” EXPERIENCES – We didn’t plan it this way at all, but the music part of the services looked way different each service. The songs were the same, the band was great in all of them, but it seemed really clear that the Holy Spirit was leading Jason differently in each service. It was a little weird and very cool.

MESSAGE WAS KIND OF FUN FOR ME – I loved sharing the Talmudic bathroom prayer as 1 Cor 10:31 illustration. But my favorite part and the part that felt kind of weird to be honest, was playing the 2 minute clip from John Piper’s message. I happily give credit to him for shaping my thinking on worship. In fact, if you want to just download some of his worship messages to your iPod & pop that in after the music segment this weekend that would be cool with me.

DANCE – Pamela Turner put together this astounding worship dance to a Sigur Ros song. I was so moved! I love reclaiming the arts. I love services where we are speaking directly to those who learn best by something other than a lecture and an outline or even singing songs. I love it when the message doesn’t beat you over the head (sometimes it needs to, but there is a place for artistically asking people to stretch & imagine).

PRAYER – I had several powerful prayer moments over the course of the weekend.
• On Friday, a friend with a proven track record shared a prophetic word with me after the service. It was pretty thought provoking. I’m still thinking about it.
• Several of us prayed with a couple of women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. I’m praying against this scourge.

LIFE WALK – I’m going to post a separate post of this tomorrow. Mostly pics, but a few reflections.

BACK IN THE H2O – I haven’t been able to surf because of all the stuff going on. Finally today, I was back in the water. Those of you that follow me on Twitter or Facebook know that today was an amazing day. Fall is the best! Everyone is back in school, so a having Monday off is awesome! Also, our weather is the best this month. We have this phenomenon called “combo swells” in the fall too. Which means that there is still some wave coming from the S Pacific (summer) and those from the N Pacific are starting to come. So there’s always something. Good waves and good weather. O yeah! Today was great. I surfed with a couple of guys from Journey. We had a blast.

Look for tomorrow’s post with pics from the LIFE WALK.

On Tuesday night, I was asked to come in & do a Q & A on the subject of homosexuality for our 20something group that goes by the moniker, Real Life. (You can check out Real Life on Facebbook by searching real life at Journey – or click here)

It was a great night and God answered prayers as I answered questions. I felt like I had some words from Him. There were a few poignant moments during my part.

But, honestly, that wasn’t the highlight of the evening. Dave Merk led us into a small group discussion. There were a lot of honest thoughts and feelings. Then one of the regulars shared her journey through issues of same-sex attraction, body image and the power of God’s grace to break secrets. I was on the edge of my chair. Amazing! (You will probably here her story in a weekend service before too long).

The group also celebrated the one-year birthday of a little boy whose single mom brings him every week. His arrival is what spurred her to seek God. The group also pitched in for a little gift that totaled over 2 months of child support. I love the body of Jesus. As Bill Hybles says, “there’s nothing like the church when the church is working right.”

A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when it’s a picture of the Kingdom.

This weekend we kicked off a series on WORSHIP called “FROM CONSUMER TO CONSUMED”. You can click here for Dan’s hilarious video promo-ing & intro-ing the series.
This is one of those series that I’ve felt a leading to do for over a year. I am, we are making no bones about it: we want and need to raise the worship temp at Journey. I have felt this for a while, but coming off last weekend’s retreat with a ministry (Click here or here to check it out or order their cd) that is marked by white-hot worship, kind of stoked up my own fire about this.

The music was epic. There were times that I felt like they had been in my head throughout the week as I was putting the message together. It also seemed to me that God was giving Jason words from Him as he led us.

At 10:45 we were singing a song who’s refrain is right out of Rom 8:28 – He makes all things work together for my Good. Right then, I ran into Mike Burns who was going in for a surgical procedure the next day. I felt overwhelmed with need of the room and the need for God to rush FAITH into the room, to experience & pray in the line of that song. So we stopped everything prayed for Mike & prayed for people that needed a kind of bridge of faith to experience & believe God for what we had just sung. I think it stretched people a little. I did as much disclaimer as I could. It was a cool moment.

MESSAGE: The message was fun for me in some ways. I really felt like I was sharing collected wisdom with nary an original thought and that that was a good thing. John Piper, Tim Keller, C.S. Lewis, John Eldridge, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, Thomas Merton, Thomas Kelly, Double Aces (Aurelius Augustine) heavily informed this message. I will forever be in debt to John Piper for one of my “conversions” or “revolutions” on my journey with Jesus.

MY JOURNEY – I had a last minute MJ that Chris Pacilio was gracious enough to consent to. It was so perfect. It set up what they call in educational circles an “anticipatory set”. I think we were leaning more forward in our chairs for the rest of the message after Chris shared.

SELAH – Of course if we’re going to do a series on Worship we need to do some worship. These things are all different but God shows up. This week it was about Freedom. There was wonderful prayer, powerful worship and almost no agenda.

I’M WITH ED – This was the big Life Walk weekend. My daughter Bethany had the idea to recruit the girls in her small group (she’s a small group leader in our HS ministry) to stand out there with clip boards & cute smiles & these T-Shirts. Well it spread out a little & the hardscape was littered with people that looked like Liesl Oestreicher. We raised over 4k in pledges just this weekend!

R U READY FOR SOME CHARGER F-BALL? Mike Perez has a block of some of the best seats at the Q and gave me 2 tix to Monday’s Charger / Bronco game. Brett & I went and had a great time with Mike & his really cute 4th grade son. Against sound advice of many lifetime San Diegans I have become a charger fan. Last night was fun because, duh!, I’m on the 49 yard line plaza level of an NFL game. But it was pretty gut wrenching, as the Chargers didn’t have any answers in the 2nd half. It’s weird to be in a line thousands deep to get on the trolley and have it be so quiet. Well at least Sunday attendance won’t take much of a hit for this week’s 10:00 am game v. the Chiefs.

There was some cool stuff I actually left out of the message; I’m going to post in a couple of days.

This weekend I was in the Shangri-La that is Iowa. “What are you doing in Iowa?” you ask. I was speaking at the Salt Company retreat. “Pardon? Was this a corporate gig? I know they grow a lot of stuff there, I didn’t know they grew salt.” Seriously!

Salt Co is a college ministry at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. It spawned a great Church out there in the middle of the cornfields called Cornerstone Church. A great church led by some great people. My connection is that a friend that was a student in my youth ministry when I was in Omaha, Mark Arant, went to school at ISU, went on staff & eventually became the head scho of Salt Co & a pastor on staff at the church. This is my 3rd time speaking. They bring in about 650-700 students every week to their Thursday night meeting. Almost 400 of them were on this retreat. I flew in to speak at the Thursday thing & then at the retreat.

They have incredible worship & God is wonderfully moving in this ministry. You can check out their latest worship CD called Anthem here.

A bonus for me was that the college group at my old church in Omaha, Christ Community decided to come up for the retreat.

God was clearly moving in the lives of the students. It seemed like it was a running take off starting on Thursday. I did a talk called “Dangerous God” that a several kids told me was their favorite one.

Fri & Saturday we did 3 messages on Elijah since I’ve been pretty immersed in his story & that part of Scripture.

Saturday night, customarily, is the night when you hope things culminate & God really lands. It was an amazing night. The band seemed to have the Spirit of God all over them. I could feel the message landing & at several points I knew that God had a word for some specific people in the crowd. As I finished we worshipped some more & then we just seemed to get leadings & specific words of things God wanted to do, gifts he wanted to give. There were some wonderfully deep prayers prayed, some great expression of the body of Jesus at it’s best, some Holy Spirit breakthroughs. It was a “WOW” moment. No doubt!

Here’s what I wrote in my journal:
I went to bed Saturday night feeling pretty spent. Thanks for releasing words, for giving me the faith to call people up, for leading me to & away from things, for bringing the weekend to a great climax for kids having that WOW, GOD IS HERE experience. Lord, people need to see You be real, obviously real sometimes. Thanks for the people I was able to pray with & for giving me guidance on how to pray with them.

After every session the staff met while the students were in their small groups. I love being able to talk about how the stuff we were teaching & preaching on can work its’ way into our ministries, and more importantly into our lives.

Here are a few of other highlights:
• It’s always cool to see Mark’s family. His kids are fun & obviously happy.

• I was supposed to snow & rain this weekend. It was actually pretty nice (by Iowa standards). Chilly & clear about 45-50 on Saturday.

• It’s fun to see the big sky & landscapes & the tree leafs starting to turn colors.
• The world changing potential of college student is breathtaking. They can & do go anywhere God leads them. They don’t have quite as much baggage to unpack as those that find Christ later in life.
* The filthiest thing I’ve seen in a long time was the air in the barn at the barn dance – hundreds of college students shaking it up at 1:00 a.m. stir up a lot of manure laden dust – looked fun… for them.

• It’s never automatic. We must pray. I’ve done lots of retreats. But I always find myself crying out to God. I know without doubt, that what need to happen in these situations is totally beyond my ability to do. GOD needs to show up & work. I love it when it happens. It’s always an act of faith as you wait.
• Seeing a guy that you’ve known since Jr High lead a ministry like this is pretty darn gratifying. I remember Mark as a student; I remember when God really got a hold of him in Jr High & high school. It’s kind of like surfing. Hear me out. One of the fun things about surfing with your buddies is that it is almost as much fun seeing them catch a good wave as getting one yourself… almost. In this case, it’s actually BETTER seeing God use someone that you’ve known & had a small part in their walk with Christ than having God use me. Hope that makes sense.

I’m flying home as I write this. The early returns say that it was a great weekend at Journey. I was praying hard that it would be. I heard that Todd did a great job with the message. I’m pretty amped up to be back & for us to launch our new series on worship: FROM CONSUMER TO CONSUMED.

Several of you – really – asked for the quotes that were in the message. Well, I aim to please. They are great quotes.

The 1st is from Charles Spurgeon – the great 19th century preacher:
Fits of depression come over the most of us. Cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy.

“The process of becoming conformed to the image of Christ takes place primarily at the point of our unlikeness to Christ’s image. God is present to us in the most destructive aspect of our cultural captivity. God’s involved with us in the most imprisoning bondage of our brokenness. God meets us in those places of our lives that are most alienated from God.”

Worth pondering!