A Gifted Response / Checking Out of Civilization

Hey friends! I'm starting work at Kingswood Camp this Monday May 23rd and will be there - weekends excepted - until near the end of August. It’s almost time for me to bring the Kingdom into canoes, cabins and forested canopies. Over this last year I've been so privileged to both continue and begin many relationships, branch out into exciting new avenues of ministry, and live out the bachelor dream with a houseful of fellas all while traversing the frontiers of social media - making a few posts now and then. The love has been real and will keep getting stronger!

But in these last weeks, I've been gradually narrowing my circles and spending a lot of time tending to my soul. Getting well-grounded is essential preparation for over a month of work and life with a very small group of leaders. Taken together, my jobs as Worship Director and “Maintenance Man of God” will engage my entire being and I want to wholeheartedly enter in. So with that said, I want to apologise for missed connections, unfulfilled plans, delayed replies, ignored invitations, and other symptoms of my search for tranquility in the Lord. Thanks to so many of you, I'm experiencing such a kaleidoscopic richness of support and community going into the summer - we’ve been doing some serious churchin’!

If you think of me, say a prayer for the camp kids as well!

And if I could leave you with any one thought, it’s this:

I don’t understand why life seems incredibly unfair for so many well meaning people; I hope if things ever took a turn for the worst I could still say this with conviction - but believing as an axiom, and seeking to implant deep in my heart that God is actually, truely, unconditionally, unsearchably good - loving ~everyone~ and desiring all people to be saved [1 Tim 2:4] - has cemented the most transformative change to my cognitive and spiritual architecture since accepting Jesus as Christ as an adult. People really really matter. And it’s not up to me to figure out all the hows and whys, to develop the right philosophy or theological system: it’s a simple gospel, and we have to keep it that way. For the sake of the children.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Gal. 2:20 [ESV]

Thus, I stand in agreement with the self who penned this first line of my 2016 journal:

Everything I do from here on to the rest of my life is a
Gifted Response.

Here's the **extended version** from one of the most astonishing and powerful gatherings at Bethel Church. Five saturated minutes where silence breaks into free expressions of worship, unmediated by the band. I see it as a picture of Heaven: when in such a vast building, under a powerful, charismatic leader like Jeremy Riddle, the Spirit can guide the worship team and congregation into one body, offering to Jesus unashamed, undivided adoration.